Managing SharePoint Content for eDiscovery and Information Governance

FRCP rules set eDiscovery requirements

As most people in the Enterprise IT and Litigation support world know by now, there have been recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that electronically stored information (ESI) is a discoverable record type and should be treated as any other type of evidence .

That has broad implications for the discovery process , in that all electronically stored information that could pertain to a case must be found, protected, and turned over to opposing counsel when requested. This FRCP requirement is the foundation of the eDiscovery requirement and the eDiscovery processes that companies and their counsel will need to create and adhere to going forward.

For the electronic portion of discovery it will be IT departments that will bear the brunt of the work as they may be directed to find specific files (including SharePoint records, emails and metadata) containing specific content, having been sent to or from specific employees, sent between specific dates, having certain content types , or residing in locations unknown within the enterprise.

The search could require wading through terabytes of data to find this information. A failure to comply in a timely and thorough manner with opposing counsel’s request, could result in the loss of the case before it ever gets to trial. The loss also means fines, damages, and opposing counsel’s fees.

SharePoint adds to the eDiscovery Problem in a Big Way

According to a Global Intranet Trends 2009 report, 55 percent of organizations have SharePoint implementations and the problems SharePoint creates for eDiscovery.

Most companies have no governance model in their build efforts that would institute a framework for managing content of all types.

They have no process for drawing the right lessons gained from deployment and joining those lessons with a long term governance model that brings value and managed frameworks to mountains and terabytes of corporate data.

For their SharePoint data they struggle to gain new business value from SharePoint’s capabilities as an enterprise content platform.

One symptom of this disjointed SharePoint deployment effort is the Document propagation that occurs when the same content is replicated and spread from server to server without concern for information governance practices and document retention requirements.

In essence these siloed and disjointed SharePoint installations probably are not meeting compliance requirements and are consuming needless bandwidth and for storage. These inefficiencies are at the root of why many enterprises stop using SharePoint.

Digital Reef SharePoint eDiscovery Solution

Responding to litigation can be a risky, time-consuming, and costly process. Each step is not only laden with its own inherent cost, but if not done can correctly can exacerbate the downstream cost and risk. Organizations must scramble to:

• Identify, preserve, and collect all potentially responsive electronically stored information
• Cull it down to a manageable set for review by counsel
• Produce the responsive data set containing electronically stored information to opposing counsel

SharePoint data is stored and maintained differently than data in other types of storage repositories, and its storage
method creates a myriad of issues relating to identification, collection, and extraction of content. It is not engineered for content extraction, and it has limited capabilities for managing the context of information. Contextual analysis is essential to eDiscovery so that the legal team can understand the framework for the content—including who created it and who modified it.

The Digital Reef Virtual Governance Warehouse is a platform for eDiscovery and information governance. Digital Reef transforms enterprise-wide content—including data stored in SharePoint infrastructure—into valuable assets by taking data “in the wild” and enabling legal, corporate, and IT visibility, insight, and control.