Commentary: The Firm: Embracing the bond between IT and legal

By Dean Kuhlmann The Daily Record Newswire Corporate litigation is often inevitable, but preparation for that inevitability is controllable. Why, then, during a meeting involving corporate litigation are the legal and IT teams introducing themselves across the table? The truth is that successful companies have embraced the brotherly bond that IT and legal departments share in this age of technology. IT and legal teams should be talking every day. It's crucial to avoiding document retention problems, e-mail archiving and a host of other complex issues that are crucial to managing discovery. Successful companies don't simply embrace this bond; they create a plan, put processes in place and stick to the strategies they lay out. In the traditional corporate environment, the accepted policy has followed the mantra: "Legal is legal's problem." But companies have recognized that legal issues aren't only the legal department's problem anymore, especially when a lawsuit is filed. The amount of electronic processing that comes into play across the entire company builds an even larger role for the IT team in preserving and collecting documents relevant to the litigation. Paralegals simply are not specialized in stopping staff members from deleting e-mail. The nature of e-mail correspondence and like forms of electronic documentation requires the delicate touch of IT personnel. The closer the IT person is knitted into that environment, the better. What feeds the disconnect between departments? For one, it's easy to cut costs early on, but it can put you in a bad position later. The emergence of comprehensive e-discovery technology has pushed more services in-house. Many companies load up on legal and allow them to purchase the software they need. Then, paralegals and non-qualified personnel end up trying to de-duplicate, search and filter electronic data, and many of them simply aren't trained well enough to do that effectively. And what about defensibility, chain of custody and other critical procedures required to defend the relevance of the data used during litigation and in court? The companies that do it right integrate legal and IT so that IT staff can step in and take care of the technical aspects. Search technology is complex and requires someone knowledgeable in IT to manage it. Transversely, IT personnel aren't versed in law. Data shouldn't be handled as data, but as evidence -- a very distinct difference when dealing with critical information that requires special handling, documentation and procedures at every juncture. Some legal departments even employ their own IT staffer within the group to manage the technical end and communicate with the IT group. That's a great way to let your IT group focus on typical help-desk issues while one or more professionals dedicate themselves solely to the needs of the legal department. The IT team must be involved from the very beginning. After all, who knows software and the many places that data can hide throughout an organization better than IT? You want to choose the right e-discovery solution, so you need the right professionals to be involved. Consider the following scenario: A paralegal runs a de-duplication program reducing the total number of records from 1 million to 800,000. The same paralegal is called up on the witness stand nine months later, and the judge questions him on the relevance of removing some 200,000 records. You must have a defensible position. If the paralegal knows only how to run the initial de-duplication (which is often the case), he probably won't know how to run a report on what was accomplished during the de-duplication process. How does the judge know that he didn't remove documents that ultimately could have taken the case in a different direction? Were the processes documented? Can the procedure be reproduced? Does anyone even remember what happened nine months ago? If you can't prove why you've done what you've done, you leave yourself in a tough position. The same applies for search terms. Searching through 1 million records for relevant ones based on key terms, concepts, dates, etc., is painstaking, time-consuming and extraordinarily complex. If you don't have the IT expertise to explain how or why you narrowed down your search, you don't have the defensibility you need to hold up in court. The organization that addresses the disconnect between IT and legal as a business problem is the organization that does it right. Create a planning statement and define the roles IT and legal departments will play together. If you do it early enough and adhere to the plan, you won't run the risk of finding yourself indefensible in court. Ways to improve connection between legal, IT 1) Embed your IT team members in your legal workflow and processes. Everyone needs to understand the process and be a part of it. Knowing the process means they can foresee problems downstream. 2) Educate everyone that "data is evidence." IT has a general philosophy that 99 percent is good enough. Educate them that 100 percent accountability at all times is the standard and that dropping bits from time to time is not acceptable in a legal environment. 3) Create a culture that promotes inter-department communications. Hold happy hours, off-site meetings, etc. Foster a relationship between the teams. 4) Include key members of legal and IT together in the planning process. Ownership and accountability become easy when it's their plan. Any member could be called to the stand, so knowing and understanding are key. 5) Always ask yourself if a given action is defensible, and explain what that means to all parties. ---------- Dean Kuhlmann handles client/partner relationships and product positioning for the Viewpoint product line at Lateral Data, an e-discovery solutions provider. Published: Thu, Jun 9, 2011