I recently challenged eDiscovery providers with cloud collection and review solutions to start tracking the CDC and OSHA websites giving the official safety guidelines for business reopening. Since then, news outlets have clear evidence that those CDC guidelines have been changed in response to political pressure. While keeping eDJ discussions apolitical, I feel the need to raise the red flag in regard to the importance of clearly documenting your entire reopening process. In my opinion, documenting your policy/protocol decisions and the ever changing ‘guidance’ that you relied on will be the greatest challenge.
If and when your company defends your COVID-19 response efforts against wrongful death or disability claims, your counsel will need a timeline that details your 5W1H explanation for every major change in your strategy OR every major change in the COVID-19 knowledge/guidance. This demonstrates that your stakeholder team was carefully monitoring new announcements, even when you decided not to change your pandemic plan.
Now that RFest 2020 is in the bag, I hope that a few providers might take up my challenge and provide us all a central reference resource. In the meantime, I recommend that you start or expand your COVID-19 team response logs with full 5W1H details and start some kind of web capture on the resources that you rely on. Even manual .mhtml saves or Adobe PDF snapshots are better than nothing.
When it comes to documenting your internal communications, alerts and compliance efforts you should consider selective COVID-19 legal holds or classification rules if your company has these capabilities. The Veritas compliance team created and released a very interesting set of classification tags/policies for customers using their Veritas Information Classifier (VIC) solution. The classification load file can be opened in a text editor to review the keywords associated with each policy.
Veritas COVID-19 VIC Policies
This is a good example of proactive defense of process efforts. It shows that they company is monitoring employees and is ready to adapt to changing conditions. Have you seen clients or other providers using enterprise classification or other systems in their COVID-19 response? If so, I want to hear about it!
Greg Buckles wants your feedback, questions or project inquiries at Greg@eDJGroupInc.com. Contact him directly for a free 15 minute ‘Good Karma’ call. He solves problems and creates eDiscovery solutions for enterprise and law firm clients.
Greg’s blog perspectives are personal opinions and should not be interpreted as a professional judgment or advice. Greg is no longer a journalist and all perspectives are based on best public information. Blog content is neither approved nor reviewed by any providers prior to being posted. Do you want to share your own perspective? Greg is looking for practical, professional informative perspectives free of marketing fluff, hidden agendas or personal/product bias. Outside blogs will clearly indicate the author, company and any relevant affiliations.