The Disconnect Continues
I attended the ACC (Association of Corporate Counsel) trade show in Seattle this week. What’s clear to me more than ever is that we are still in an extremely immature market phase for eDiscovery.
First of all, there is a clear disconnect between legal folks, records and information management folks, and IT. Why else would the biggest records management show of the year (ARMA) in Las Vegas take place the same week as the ACC show?
These sets of folks need to be getting together, not partying in two separate cities. It’s no wonder organizations can’t get their acts together and create tenable retention policies – these two groups don’t even know each other exists (one attendee at ACC told me that she asked the ACC show management why they scheduled the show the same week as ARMA and the response was, “what’s ARMA?”).
No offense to lawyers and hard-working legal staff, but who in their right mind actually believes it’s a reasonable policy to simply get rid of all data as quickly as possible because of the risk of having to discover it? Don’t believe people actually do this?
Well, several GC (general counsel) staff that came by the Mimosa booth looked at our banner and said, “Archiving? Not interested – we want to find ways to get rid of the data, not save it.” WAKE UP! A safe harbor for data destruction exists assuming a reasonable policy is in place.
It’s simply not reasonable to think that business documents (which all email are) can be simply deleted after 90 days. While many of them probably can, it’s not enough to just get rid of all email every 90 days. It’s time to put some thought into issues like role-based retention and take advantage of granular retention management from the likes of Mimosa instead of hiding behind some ridiculous blanket policy.
Apologies for the rant…but how do these otherwise brilliant people suddenly lose all common sense and think they can hide behind sorry retention policies – or better yet, continue to hide behind the cover of “inaccessible data” when we all know that digital information is all too accessible?
Let’s get the right players in the same room, create some tenable retention policies, and finally make eDiscovery a somewhat efficient process!!
Tags: disconnect, eDiscovery, general counsel, information management, IT, legal, records, records management, retention management
