Corporate America - The EDD Dilemma Today

The USA is drowning in a sea of litigation due to increased visibility and scrutiny.  In the age of electronic information, the discovery and litigation support markets have climbed to monolithic proportions.  Today, an estimated 50% of litigation spend is attributed to discovery related activities. Electronic Discovery is also hailed as the largest “line item” growth in the Fortune 1000 in the past 10 years.

As the litigation support market continues to grow and the regulatory environment evolves and expands, corporations are producing billions of pages of data per year for a variety of different matters.  In the past, these matters were few and far between. Often, corporations do not think about electronic discovery at all until faced with intensive, large scale litigation.  The result is a “fire drill” effect, with different people from different departments handling different types of data in different ways.

In today’s high profile, aggressive, legal and regulatory environment, corporations are looking for solutions that allow them to control the discovery process. Their goal is to mitigate risk, avoid abundant costs, and meet the tight deadlines often imposed by requesting parties.

As quoted from the article, “Alleged Discovery Abuses Lead to $500M Dismissal”, in the October 6, 2004 Fulton County Daily Report, Steven H. Pollak states:

 ”Because it delayed producing hundreds of thousands of documents in discovery, Mariner Health Care has lost its shot at hundreds of millions of dollars.”

This is an extreme circumstance; however, it is becoming more commonplace for corporations to incur costly legal penalties and court sanctions when discovery documents are late, inaccurate or incomplete. It is also increasingly apparent that requesting counsel will seek sanctions for non-compliance with discovery requirements.

As taken from the WSJ article, “Age of Discover-How Morgan Stanley Botched A Big Case by Fumbling Emails” on May 16, 2005 by Susanne Craig:

 “Morgan Stanley is in serious trouble because of the way it mishandled an increasingly critical matter for companies: handing over email and other documents in legal battles. Lawsuits these days require companies to comb through electronic archives and are sometimes won or lost based on how the litigants perform these tasks. Morgan Stanley kept uncovering new backup tapes, couldn't perform full searches because of technology glitches and gave material to the other side that was sometimes incomplete or late.”

Clearly, corporations are at risk when performing the tasks necessary to respond to discovery requests.  A lack of knowledge and expertise in knowing how to approach discovery tasks often results in less than desirable outcomes.  Over and under production of data occurs through a lack of understanding discovery request parameters, the need to preserve data and the industry standards that typically apply.

Corporations and their counsel can no longer afford to handle electronic discovery in a reactive manner.  Companies lose significant value, individuals are held civilly and criminally responsible and C-level executives have increased personal responsibility for the integrity of financial information. Establishing a repeatable, transparent and defensible business process around legal, regulatory and administrative requests for data can significantly mitigate risks, lower costs, and save money. Production of responsive data to requesting parties is standardized across projects, across law firms and across the enterprise ensuring consistent deliverables, deadlines and removing the costs associated with redundant processing.

The Ibis response to the need for proactive discovery readiness is managed service offerings.  IThese services are built on a foundation of experienced people, tested business processes and state-of-the-art-technical infrastructure. 

The results achieved through proactive implementation of managed service offerings are realized in a number of ways.

• Risk Mitigation
• Cost Control
• Consistent & Predictable Discovery Production

For further information, please contact Ibis at info@ibisconsulting.com for details.