Legal Discovery Drill

If you ever want to really drive home the need for records management and info architecture in your enterprise, run a discovery drill on the production systems. Drive it from Legal and send in “auditors” for outside counsel and work through the IT processes, testing, term searches, extracts and exports, org charts, the works.

In the least it would tick off the admins and DBA’s who have to do the grunt work. But, it could open up all sorts of discussions around the right ways to structure metadata and content such that the discovery process is more straightforward and less risky. Preserving content is half the battle; the other half is finding it.

There will always be a divide between managers who want to identify and separate content as “records” and those who recognize that the process of record identification is too much work and that all content should be considered part of the record albeit in a “big bucket” sense. For example, email that is not considered a record by a small group of records managers and is deleted could be later deemed extremely relevant to an investigation and a judge could decide to slap an adverse judgment on the evidence meaning that the jury should assume the worse possible conclusion about the email’s contents. The risk of this is weighed by counsel…