Extract from Cassandre Coyer’s article “Rise of Collaboration Apps Could Make Data Custodians Irrelevant”
For every problem they solved for professionals around the world, collaboration applications probably created twice the amount of challenges for e-discovery.
Speakers at the “Facing Preservation Dilemmas Head On—Tackling Complexities of Workplace Collaboration Tools” Wednesday session at the 10th annual UF Law E-Discovery Conference in Gainesville, Florida, discussed some of the collection and preservation challenges that collaboration programs can create. They also offered tips on how to approach reasonable preservation of collaboration program data.
‘Who Is the Custodian?’
One of the main challenges that collaboration programs have created lies in the name itself: collaboration. As users work together on documents or projects that are jointly owned via different collaboration applications, identifying custodians has become trickier, noted Rose Jones, a partner at King & Spalding.
“Who is the custodian?” Jones said, adding “with respect to access and who a custodian is, [it] is getting more challenging.”
In fact, Suzanne Clark, mass torts discovery counsel at Beasley Allen Law Firm, suggested that the concept of a custodian might not be as relevant as it used to be and that legal professionals shouldn’t rely on custodians as much to start their e-discovery protocols.
