Who owns EDRM Information Management and the ESI Inventory?

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) (www.edrm.net) is the de facto industry standard methodology for guiding enterprise legal and IT organizations required to support managing, collecting, reviewing, and producing evidence from electronically stored information (ESI).  However, for EDRM Information Management (www.edrm.net/projects/imrm) , a cornerstone best practice and critical step in becoming more proactive in eDiscovery, is often missing and not well connected across legal and IT organizations to drive support for eDiscovery and Litigation readiness, especially, when compared to preservation, processing, reviewing, analysis, and production. 

Who in the enterprise owns EDRM Information Management?

Learn the CRITICAL step that's missing in legal and IT for eDiscovery and Litigation 

One reason is the lack of a standard ESI Inventory that can be accessed by legal, corporate, and IT to actively provide record information management and free up millions of dollars in resources wasted on reactively responding to eDiscovery requests.

As far as ownership, the IT organization and the Legal team need to jointly own EDRM Information Management in order for it to work, proactively and on-demand.  The IT organization owns all enterprise information management and making ESI available to legal and corporate users as valuable information assets.   The Legal organization owns litigation and case management and supporting all the litigation needs of the business.  In order to transform to proactive eDiscovery and become truly litigation-ready the IT and Legal organizations must both own implementing EDRM information management and a proactive ESI Inventory.

Here are 5 techniques to work on that will bring IT and Legal together:

1. Create an EDRM Information Management Center of Excellence with representatives from Legal, Corporate, and IT
2. Task the Center of Excellence to collaboratively define a logical and physical ESI Inventory that quickly produces valuable information assets
3. Assign owners to proactively view, classify, and report on the ESI Inventory assets and provide the policies for responding to litigation and compliance processing.
4. Create information asset dashboards that feed business visibility to legal, compliance, and records managers.   Establish best practices for gaining additional business insight and intelligence using analytics and reporting
5. Transition to an active file governance infrastructure and supporting IT capability that standardizes proactive policy management and makes the CIO a true service partner with legal and corporate users.
6. If enterprises can establish an eDiscovery Center of Excellence that brings together legal and IT,  the opportunity to positively impact legal and IT costs and mitigating corporate risks will become very compelling.