Information Governance
Corporations create nearly 15 petabytes (or 15 million gigabytes) worth of data every day. All of that information, in combination with new business requirements for storing, securing, finding, and leveraging that information, are transforming the traditional records management process into a broader information governance methodology. Companies that manage and govern their information more effectively are the ones more likely to succeed, while also reducing costs and mitigating business risk.
IT.com’s Information Governance solution creates intelligent repositories that make identifying and leveraging a corporation’s information for electronic discovery, internal and government investigations, defensible deletion, and audits easy.
Electronic Discovery
Once sued, it is impossible to assess liability without a good deal of knowledge. Similarly, the degree of liability is a potentially huge source of cost saving: settle for something quickly or risk settlement or court for a much larger amount of money. Early case assessment is possible only with a solution at the ready to determine "what happened here" and therefore "what is my exposure" from the mountain of electronically stored information (ESI). One is otherwise guessing in the dark. You can use IT-Discovery to begin your discovery at any time, and the law firm can pass on the legal implications of your exposure.
Since the greatest cost savings in litigation is a direct function of the amount to be reviewed by outside counsel, the key is providing as little as possible, while of course providing as much as is necessary. The noise in most ESI, the use of keywords which naturally overproduces, the very broad nature of discovery requests which sometimes stick, all conspire to make a document production for review very large. IT-Discovery plays on both sides of this fence: it helps reduce the amount produced for review, and it makes the review by the law firm much more efficient.
The biggest problem in any large review set is getting rid of the vast amount of noise that constitutes a typical email inbox -- these are the server alerts, jokes, and dinner plans that are usually of little importance to your investigation, but nevertheless managed to make it through the keyword, custodian and date filtering process. At the same time that it produces and hides the likely irrelevant material, it produces and highlights the likely relevant material.
It is well known that eighty percent of the cost of producing to the other party is the cost of Attorney time reviewing documents. IT-Discovery's single-minded focus is in finding what matters and making what doesn't matter disappear. By doing so, IT-Discovery reduces the cost of review by reducing the amount needed to review.
Internal and Government Investigations
Ask the most astute investigators how they begin an investigation or regulatory inquiry and the most honest answer is always "good question". The typical way one begins is to interview various players, but which ones? With IT-Discovery, you can begin your investigations in minutes, quickly find unknown facts, and solve investigations in half the time. IT-Discovery proactively helps you uncover facts impossible to know at the outset and leads you to which suspects matter and why. Many governmental agencies have a need to do investigations and IT-Discovery brings its same force to that task that it does for internal investigation of corporations. Additionally, there is the need, under FOIA, for example, for the federal government to produce documents legally requested and falling under the statute as necessary to produce. This task can be monumental. IT-Discovery can be used by governmental agencies to quickly and inexpensively respond to such requests.
Defensible Deletion
Approximately 50% of the data currently stored online within a typical organization is old, obsolete or unnecessary to retain. But how do you know what information to delete or retain? And how do you know you are complying with regulatory and internal governance requirements? Answering those questions in an automated fashion has been extremely difficult, until now. IT-Discovery can review millions of emails and documents to classify them for deletion and retention in accordance with regulatory and internal governance requirements -- automatically. Deleting this unusable information significantly reduces legal and compliance risks. Further, it yields tangible ROI in the IT storage budget since it significantly reduces the amount of store required.
Audits
Negotiating business terms with partners and suppliers can be a long, demanding process. But once negotiations are completed and goods or dollars begin to flow, there is limited visibility to ensure that the terms negotiated are the terms actually executed. It’s not because no one cares. They do. In fact, they care a lot. Auditing contracts can add millions of dollars directly to the bottom line. It’s because no one can get the information to make a useful analysis possible. Whether your company needs to ensure contract compliance or perform an audit (e.g., post-acquisition audit), IT-Discovery can join disparate information systems to determine if contracted terms have been followed.