Extract from Victoria Hudgins’s article “An E-Discovery Data ‘Island’ Could Wreak Havoc on Corporate Information Governance”
Information governance and a corporation’s established data retention and deletion process should apply to e-discovery, but that is sometimes easier said than done.
When Stephen Dempsey worked in a law firm, he said he didn’t understand why it took corporate clients a month to decide what to do with e-discovery data after a case was closed. Now, as a member of Chemours’ in-house legal team, he sees first-hand the various opinions needed before emailing a response.
“What the client wants is a combination of multiple parties’ thoughts on what we think will happen in the future,” Dempsey explained during ILTACON 2021′s “Discovery, Information Governance and Retention: How Long Should This Go On?” panel.
While the cost of storing electronic data is increasingly cheap, Dempsey and other panelists argued the legal and reputational price of holding onto unnecessary e-discovery data needs to be proactively managed prior to the legal matter’s conclusion.
