From an article posted to the Infosecurity-us.com website yesterday:
When litigation-based data management isn’t taken seriously dire consequences will occur.
When it comes to electronic discovery, if you fail to protect potentially relevant data and it’s destroyed, no matter the excuse, you have deprived the other side of their right to all relevant evidence to support their case and subsequently put them at a disadvantage.
What are your responsibilities when it comes to securing data that could be used against you in a current or future civil lawsuit? Judges today have little sympathy for accidental or shoddy data handling practices when it comes to protecting and turning over data in litigation.
Controlling your company’s information at all times is crucial if, or when, you get dragged into civil litigation. What is eDiscovery? Well, it’s not an afterhours team-building exercise. Electronic discovery (also called eDiscovery or Discovery) refers to any process (in any country) in which electronic data is sought, located, secured, and searched with the intent of using it as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case. The eDiscovery process can be carried out offline on a particular computer or it can be accomplished on a corporate network.
Since the new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) were adopted in December 2006, judges expect that organizations in eDiscovery have complete control of their organization’s data and can fully respond to an eDiscovery request in days or weeks, not months or years.
eDiscovery101 