Question: Are there industry verticals where eDiscovery is more predominate or more challenging than in other verticals?

O’Neil: The short answer is that heavily regulated industries like financial services, life sciences, and health care providers typically have a significant number of legal and regulatory events requiring preservation and production of electronically stored information (ESI) on an annual basis.
The current economic downturn has created the perfect storm for many financial services organizations…reduced profits, increased regulatory scrutiny, disgruntled shareholders and a complex transaction-based business model.  Many financial services organizations are dealing with this problem by retaining all ESI within the purview of the organization.  The trend results in the “double-edged sword” of needing to retain, manage and preserve information which it had no legal or regulatory requirement to retain for an indefinite period of time and also paying the cost to review, analyze and produce the information for legal and regulatory purposes.

Life sciences companies, particularly pharmaceutical companies, need to retain information related to the product supply chain, FDA communications, clinical trials, as well as other corporate records typically retained.  Many of these organizations have operations in multiple countries, create content in multiple languages, engage in mergers and acquisitions and have complex compliance issues related to anti-trust, intellectual property, privacy issues and significant litigation requirements.

The Healthcare industry has unique challenges surrounding retention and security of patient medical records and PII, medical malpractice claims, vendor and contract management.  The lack of standards for medical records retention results in retaining patient data and records indefinitely and replication of information.  All these factors make for eDiscovery which is costly and riddled with over-production due to the operational inefficiencies created by the complex nature of the problem and the lack of defensible strategy and lack of scalable and repeatable processes to deal with the business problem.

All this said, litigation is a cost of doing business for many organizations across all segments of the public and private sectors.  Organizations should examine and understand their legal and regulatory profile and their IT infrastructure to be prepared for discovery.  Managing legal and regulatory challenges requires a holist understanding of the business problems, costs, risks and potential return on an investment in technology to drive sustainable change.

eDiscovery StraightTalk by William O’Neil, Esq.

We hope you have found this issue of eDiscovery StraightTalk insightful.  If you have questions that you would like to have answered in future issues, please submit them via email at david@kazeon.com.