Archive for January, 2010

Richard Ellis, manager UK & Ireland, Iron Mountain Digital warned IT departments that ignoring the growth of e-mail data are putting business continuity at risk.

Even with the rise of new collaboration technologies, e-mail remains the blood flow of the business. The faster it flows, the faster business happens and so it is little surprise that e-mail data is growing daily – up to 30% annually according to some industry analysts.

The Cost of Collection:

Medium to large sized organizations are being driven to lower their overall litigation costs by bringing more of the eDiscovery processes in-house. To do this, organizations need to understand and proactively plan for the eDiscovery process. The most cost effective way to quickly lower eDiscovery costs are to prepare for the collection phase by putting in place an ESI archive to capture and manage those ESI silos that are most requested…Email, File System and SharePoint ESI.

Archiving software has been around for a decade now and eventually organizations will start to question if the product they initially deployed is still offering them value or if there are better solutions out there that match their requirements better.  After the decision has been made to pick a better archiving solution the obvious question arises on how to get the data out of the current existing system and into the new system.

In the investor related action, Pension Comm. of the Univ. of Montreal Pension Plan v. Banc of Am. Secs, No. CIV. 05-9016, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1839 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 11, 2010) the defendants, who were connected to a hedge fund that lost money, sought sanctions against the plaintiffs for failing to preserve and produce documents, including ESI, and for submitting false declarations regarding their collection and production efforts. The Judge in this case was the Honorable Shira A. Scheindlin.

Exchange Storage management was what triggered the rapid uprise in email archiving tools in the beginning of the 2000.  It was primarily caused by the limited end user mailbox sizes that was caused by the limitations in storage, software and overall cost associated with it.  In the years after, organizations embraced stubbing as a means to clean out end users mailboxes in an attempt to keep storage costs in control.

United States District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin issued five groundbreaking opinions in 2003 and 2004,  on the now very much known case of Zubulake v UBS Warburg.  This case is generally considered the first definitive case in the United States on a wide range of electronic discovery issues. These issues include:

• Data sampling
• The scope of the duty to preserve electronic evidence during the course of the litigation

The revised Rules of Civil Procedure in Ontario Canada now includes Rule 29.2, the proportionality doctrine which states that the right to conduct discovery must be weighed against the time, expense and undue burden the producing party bears. This new rule sounds a great deal like the U.S. FRCP Rule 26(b)(2). The U.S. rule says that information is relevant and discoverable if there is any possibility it may be relevant to the claim. The new Canadian rules say that only information that is truly relevant in the case must be disclosed. The concept is to figure out what ESI is really relevant to the case instead of requiring production of all ESI that could be relevant to the case.

In the case of Starbucks Corp. v. ADT Security Servs., Inc., 2009 WL 4730798 (W.D. Wash. Apr. 30, 2009) the defendant, ADT Security Services tried to avoid its obligation to product archived email data because they were not reasonably accessible because of undue burden and/or cost which is one of the terms used in the FRCP rulings.  To support this statement ADT provided various estimates of the potential cost of time and money to restore the requested data.  However, the plaintiff (Starbucks in this case), countered this statement with their calculation of the exercise which were significant lower than those suggested by ADT.

First of all, many of you are wondering what RBS is.  Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) is an API that is available as an add-on feature pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express.  It is designed to actually move the storage of binary large objects (BLOBs) from costly storage on database servers to cheaper storage solutions and is also available as  such for SharePoint Portal Server.  The advantages of RBS are that it can save you a significant amount of storage space, conserves hardware resources and allows the end user transparent access to their data.

Research from Enterprise Strategy Group finds the space will continue to grow as more companies bring litigation support operations in-house.

In a recent article published on the destinationCRM.com website by Christopher Musico, it was pointed out that eDiscovery requests in 2010 are expected to rise from the already high rates of 2009.