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if you just have a retention schedule that says, ‘get rid of tax records after
seven years,’ there’s no visibility into who said ‘seven years.’
lorrie luellig, ATTORNEY, RYLEY CARLOCK & APPLEWHITE
account different regulations for the various markets and geogra-phies the company operates in — no easy task, considering that
there are more than 9,000 state regulations governing information management in the U.S. alone, and 20% of those laws change
every year, says Luellig. The company must also track which
lawsuits or regulatory queries require a “hold” on the deletion of
certain documents, and it must ensure that the hold is enforced
and then lifted when the issue is resolved.
Executive sponsorship is critical to ensure that funding is
made available and to get cooperation from busy managers. To
get that backing, highlight “quick hits” that save money, such as
how defensible disposal can reduce the number of backup tapes
you need, says Harry Pugh, a former
managing director at Citigroup who
now consults with clients on information governance.
Defining common terms and classification rules is essential but can be
difficult. “The I T professionals are too
often simply focused on server capacity
and system and infrastructure capacity
and needs,” says Peter Sloan, a partner
at Husch Blackwell, a litigation and business law firm in Kansas City, Mo. “The
in-house lawyers are often focused solely
upon sanctions, exposure and litigation.
The regulatory lawyers are thinking
about retention requirements,” and
records management often focuses only
on paper documents, not on electronic
information.
the data and the workflow required to execute retention policies,
says Deidre Paknad, president and CEO of PSS Systems.
IDC analyst Vivian Tero also recommends Autonomy’s
eDiscovery suite, which handles automated data collection,
advanced analytics, filtering and deduplication, and workflow-related tasks, including processing of hold notices. In the past
two years, Autonomy has purchased content management
software vendor Interwoven as well as CA Records Manager
(which manages physical records) and CA Message Manager
(which stores and organizes messages for regulatory compliance) from CA Technologies. Another option, Tero says, is EMC
SourceOne eDiscovery, which combines content discovery and
help from software
The ideal defensible disposition software would help an organization define,
store, distribute and execute retention
policies, as well as track and coordinate
the execution of legal holds. Only 43%
of the respondents to the Forrester
Research survey said their message archiving application supports legal holds.
Atlas Information Governance Suite
from PSS Systems, which was acquired
by IBM last fall, is “generally perceived
to be the top of the line for functional-ity,” says Hill. It can implement legal
holds and analyze data in both IBM and
non-IBM data repositories. It not only
helps organizations define their policies, but also provides multiple views of
fight? What Fight?
Some observers say crafting defensible disposal policies involves a lot of squabbling. not
so, says Wendy Butler Curtis, an attorney at Orrick, herrington & Sutcliffe.
“we find it to be exceptionally responsive and often our best evangelists,” she
says, because data disposal helps IT meet its budget, improve system performance and
reduce user complaints. Meanwhile, the records management staff wants to make a contribution instead of staying “in the basement with the records,” she adds. And the legal
department is under pressure to cut the costs of reviewing unneeded data, plus it faces the
risk that potentially damaging data resides in those old files.
Far from squabbling, she says, business units engage in an “extraordinary” degree of
collaboration because they have so many reasons to work together.
— ROBeRT L. SCheIeR
FOTOLIA / DUCKMAN76
