Continued from yesterday…

Scenario #2 (using the same example from yesterday except your email retention policy is now 2 years and you have an Information Governance program that ensures all unstructured data is searchable and actively managed in place)

Its 1:52 pm on the Friday before you leave on a much anticipated 2 week vacation in Hawaii…yada, yada, yada

It’s a letter from the law offices of Lewis, Gonsowski & Tolson informing you that their client, ACME Systems, is suing your company for $225 million for conspiracy to harm ACME’s reputation and future sales by spreading false information about ACME’s newest product line. You’re told that the plaintiff has documentation (an email) from an ABC Systems employee outlining the conspiracy. You also receive a copy of the “smoking gun” email…

——-

From: Ted
Date: June 2, 2012
To: Rick

Re: Acme Systems new solutions

“I would say we need to spread as much miss-information and lies about their solution’s capabilities as possible.  We need to throw up as much FUD as we can when we talk to the analyst community to give us time to get our new application to market.  Maybe we can make up a lie about them stealing their IP from a Chinese company.” 

——-

Should I cancel the vacation? …Not yet

You call the VP of IT and ask her if she has the capability to pull an email from 13 months ago. She tells you she does have all of the emails going back two years but there are literally millions of them and it will take weeks to go through them.

You remember getting a demo from Recommind two weeks ago showing their On Demand Review and Analysis platform with a really neat capability to visualize data relationships. So you call up Recommind and setup a quick job.

IT starts the upload of the email data set to the Recommind Cloud platform.

You call your wife and ask her to delay the vacation until Monday…she’s not happy but it could have been worse.

The next morning (Saturday) you meet your team at the office and sign into the hosted eDiscovery platform and pull up the visualization module and run a search against the uploaded email data set for any mention of ACME Systems. Out of the 2 million emails you get hits on 889 emails.

You then ask the system to graphically show the messages by sender and recipient. You quickly find Ted and Rick and their email and even one from Rick to David… Interesting.

Within the hour you are able to assemble the entire conversation thread:

Email #1

From: CEO
Date: May 29, 2012
To: Sandra; Steve

Subject: Acme Systems new solutions

Please give some thought about what we should do to keep momentum going with our sales force in response to ACME Systems latest release of their new router. I can see our sales force getting discouraged with this new announcement.

Please get back to me with some ideas early next week.

Thanks Greg

Email #2

From: Steve
Date: May 29, 2012
To: Greg; Sandra

Re: Acme Systems new solutions

Greg, I will get with Sandra and others and brainstorm this topic no later than tomorrow and get back to you. Sandra, what times are good for you to get together?

Thanks Steve

 

Email #3

From: Sandra
Date: May 30, 2012
To: Ted

Re: Acme Systems new solutions

Ted, considering ACME’s new router announcement, how do you think we should counter their PR?

Thanks Sandra

 

Email #4

From: Ted
Date: June 1, 2012
To: Sandra; Bob

Re: Acme Systems new solutions

If it wasn’t illegal, I would suggest we need to spread as much misinformation about their new router as possible to the analyst community to create as mush FUD as we can to give us time to get our new solution out. Maybe we can make up a lie about them stealing their IP from a Chinese company.

But obviously that’s illegal (right?). Anyway…I suggest we highlight our current differentiators and produce a roadmap showing how and when we will catch and surpass them.

Regards Ted

 

Email #5

From: Rick
Date: June 1, 2012
To: Ted

Re: Acme Systems new solutions

Ted, I heard you had a funny suggestion for what we should do about ACME’s new router… What did you say?

Thanks Bob

 

Email #6 (The incriminating email)

From: Ted
Date: June 2, 2012
To:  Rick

Re: ACME Systems new solutions

“I would say we need to spread as much miss-information and lies about their solution’s capabilities as possible.  We need to throw up as much FUD as we can when we talk to the analyst community to give us time to get our new application to market.  Maybe we can make up a lie about them stealing their IP from a Chinese company.”

It looks like I will make the flight Monday morning after all…

The moral of the story

Circumstances often dictate the need for additional technical capabilities and experience levels to be acquired – quickly. The combination of rising levels of litigation, skyrocketing volumes of information being stored, tight budgets, short deadlines, resource constraints, and extraordinary legal considerations can put many organizations involved in litigation at a major disadvantage.

The relentless growth of data, especially unstructured data, is swamping many organizations. Employees create and receive large amounts of data daily, a majority of it is email – and most of it is simply kept because employees don’t have the time to spend making a decision on each work document or email whether it rises to the level of a record or important business document that may be needed later. The ability to visualize large data sets provides users the opportunity to get to the heart of the matter quickly instead of looking at thousands of lines of text in a table.