I recently received an interesting essay from a public relations officer, Dave Dix, who wrote:

“In the wake of Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley, and new Civil Rules of Federal Procedure in 2006 governing standards for preserving information, e-discovery (i.e., identifying, collecting, and processing electronic legal evidence) is turning into an ever-greater expense for many mid- and large sized companies. Unstructured information is proliferating, spending is skyrocketing, heavyweight analysts such as Gartner and Forrester are weighing in. More and more enterprises are deciding to bring e-discovery in-house, rather than have it performed by litigation support services firms. But when they do, they'll need to assemble a careful checklist of features their solution will need to have to be effective.”

He then included the following essay from Ursula Talley, vice president of marketing for StoredIQ, a provider of “enterprise-class Intelligent Information Management solutions that enable organizations to gain visibility and control over business-critical information in order to meet compliance, governance, and legal discovery requirements.”

The remainder of today’s column is Talley’s work (with minor edits). I was particular impressed that she does not even mention her own products!

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If you work for a mid- to large-sized company - say, one with more than $500 million in revenue - you are probably familiar with the problems of e-discovery. Your enterprise may routinely face five or more litigation matters each year, and you have terabytes of unstructured information that you need to sort through in order to find relevant information and place it on litigation hold.

Worse, that unstructured information is growing dramatically: at a rate of up to 80% a year in many enterprises. Unmanaged and unplanned-for e-discovery tasks increase both risk and headaches for legal, IT, and business unit organizations. Outsourcing e-discovery to litigation services firms makes sense if you don’t have much data or rarely face litigation, but it doesn’t make good financial sense as your organization grows. That’s particularly true if you work in highly regulated and litigation-prone industries such as banking, insurance, energy, or utilities.

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, specializes in security and operations management consulting services. CV online.