Litigation Readiness

Allison Brecher, Marsh & McLennan Co.
Hilary Lane, NBC
Cheryl Strom, McDonalds
Bruce Whitney, Air Products
Dominic Jaar, Bell Canada
Identifying Risk Areas
Developing a Solution
“ Selling” it to Management

Telecommunications – Dominic Jaar
Food Services – Cheryl Strom
Media/Entertainment – Hilary Lane
Financial Services – Allison Brecher
Industrial – Bruce Whitney

Need for Uniformity and Cost-effective Solution to E-Discov ery

Built a custom solution to manage legal holds and document preservation
Created a short webinar for outside counsel describing our systems and capabilities
Preparing web-based training for employees involved in a legal hold

Emphasize cost savings, both on outside counsel spend and reducing risk
Evaluated products on the market and assessed cost of and time involved in building a custom solution
The e-discovery rules will likely catch on outside the US…better to be prepared now

Cost control in a new environment
E-discovery is still at its early stage in Canada
Higher management sees it as an extraordinary situation where they would rather spend the money on a case by case basis rather than invest in education, processes and tools
Meanwhile, the legal department’s budget is not increased while the expenses relating to
e-discovery soar

Benchmark peer companies
Created a Steering Committee
Educate each other and management about e-discovery
Handle legal hold notices and prioritize technology investments

Compliance with Legal Hold Policy
Getting employees to understand their responsibilities
Making the process easier for in-house counsel

Employee training and certification
Currently testing various solutions to more easily search for relevant ESI

Improving communications while promoting e-discovery awareness and enhancing technology capabilities

Established working group of litigators and IT personnel to collect documents, monitor/prioritize, consider best practices
Hire IT personnel dedicated to
e-discovery
New software

Starting from scratch
Sweeping changes in
e-discovery obligations required:
creation of uniform procedures
major technology investments

Purchased two software products to classify records on a company-wide basis and implement legal hold notices
Currently developing e-discovery extranet
Considering selection of single firm to handle e-discovery issues

Many employees join company via acquisition
Needed to develop cohesive and uniform records management strategy

Developing internal website based on Sharepoint with access given to records managers
Website used to
maintain and revise records retention policies
facilitate communication among different subsidiaries
identify confidential data

Explosion of the volume of e-docs transformed litigators in records collectors and analysts
Litigators spent a great deal of time
dealing with IS/IT
understanding the infrastructure
interviewing custodians

Developed a clear process to handle e-discovery by delegating different tasks to IS/IT, RM, security, etc.
Put in place a semi-automated litigation hold procedure supported by interview forms

Legal Searches for Electronic Information
Needed a way to search and preserve electronic information

Identified and evaluated various e-discovery solutions that would enable paralegals/attorneys to search electronic information across all repositories (including web-content) and preserve potentially relevant information
Paralegals/attorneys would be able to cull out potentially relevant information before exporting to outside counsel for additional review

Litigation Readiness

by Dominic Jaar on Jan 12, 2009

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Litigation Readiness — Presentation Transcript