Pay Now Or Pay Later: How Changes In Electronic Discovery Will Impact Your Business By Matt Scherocman, PCMS

As a business owner or manager it is a certainty that you will be involved in litigation from time to time. Disagreements going legal are a common part of doing business in today's world. This means that the day will come when you find yourself scrambling for a laundry list of discoverable items demanded by the opposing attorney. To further complicate matters, most of the information in business today is held electronically which until now this has been manageable. However, recent changes to the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are forcing much stricter requirements to provide a lot more electronically stored information as evidence in civil court cases much sooner.

These changes to FRCP also provide more specific and detailed requirements of legal holds. Legal hold is a process whereby information (electronic or otherwise) involved in litigation cannot be modified, discarded or moved and may be requested by opposing counsel. Legal holds can begin much earlier than you might expect, even before a lawsuit is filed, so it is important to have early discussions with your lawyer when a potential legal dispute appears. Additionally, updates to the FRCP mandate the production of electronic data be in "native" (original) form. The electronic discovery and production process must accommodate all original forms and provide an audit trail of the item history. The changes in these rules are forcing organizations to expand their data management practices to incorporate more than regulatory compliancy requirements resulting in more complex rules and greatly expanded storage and retrieval processes. From a recent Information Week article: "The amended rules are to CIOs what Sarbanes- Oxley was to CFOs."

Matt Scherocman is Vice President of Consulting Services at PCMS. PCMS is a Cincinnati based IT consulting company focused on delivering infrastructure and data management solutions for mid-market corporations. Recognitions of their success include being a Gold Symantec Partner and being a Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year in 2006. Contact Matt at 513-587-3120 or matts@itadvisorgroup.com.