Q: Whose responsibility will it be to audit the managed folders to ensure users are using them correctly?
A: If we're going to conduct an audit, we'll do it together. We'll talk about the parameters of the audit together—that will be something legal and IT discuss before it's implemented. And then, although IT would have the technical responsibility to perform the audit, because I don't have that capacity, we would sort of create the audit parameters together.
It's been a real partnership between legal and IT as we've gone through this. The Help desk has been involved every step of the way because they're on the front line answering questions. I shoot them questions by email every day, they shoot me questions, we talk about it over the phone. And we just try to make sure we're constantly giving employees the same message.
I think that kind of collaborative effort or spirit between legal and IT is vital to having this kind of policy be successfully implemented.
Like I said, employees are going to have to go through the pain of a change in the way that they do business and manage their data. But once this painful period of implementation is over, it's going to be much better for our company.
Q: Do you think employees will come around to see the benefits of the policy?
A: Yes. It's a hassle to constantly be going sifting through data. It will become automatic. You'll save the things that must be saved, and the rest of it, let it go—it's just junk. And I'm probably one of the worst offenders. I still haven't cleaned out my Inbox, but I will.
But also, this is a time for businesses to think about their own best practices. You know—is it best practice to maintain all of your sales data on email? Probably not. It's time to think about other ways of managing our data. Data is critical to our company, so it should be one of the highest priorities. So this is really forcing people, I think, to do things in a better, more efficient way, but it does come with the pain of change.
Q: Do you think that companies in general are doing a good job with document retention?
A: This policy is really an attempt to be proactive—to ensure that we're not going to be one of the companies that's spending tens of millions of dollars in attorneys' fees. But having been a litigator for ten years, I have numerous stories of clients who didn't implement a policy until after they learned the hard way. I myself have managed teams of temporary attorneys at law firms who are working in shifts so that there's almost 24-hours a day of reviewing time for federal court litigation and for justice department investigations that cost the client tens of millions of dollars. And it's wasteful, and it's a business interruption for the client. And it happens over and over again.
It's something that should be on every inhouse lawyer's radar, but I think because the change can be difficult to implement, there's a lot of pushback from employees. And so you really need to have an executive team that's supportive, which we certainly had, and an IT department that's not only supportive but has the capacity and the capability to get it done, which we have. So I was lucky—we had the perfect complement of factors to get this done fairly quickly.
But I could tell you many horror stories. I can't give you the names of clients, but I've worked on many investigations and many litigations where the tab for the review of documents was astronomical.
Q: Any last words for IT pros on what they need to know or should be doing with records retention?
A: I think that in companies where there isn't an inhouse legal department, they can certainly be proactive in talking with their executive team about the need for a policy like this. They should focus on the benefits to the company in terms of cost-savings and risk management. Maybe it's not a burden that should fall on IT, but it really may be on them in the first instance to start talking to their executive committee about the need for a program like this.
If they have an inhouse legal department, then being good partners with the legal department—that's everything. If you partner with legal, and you have an open flow of communication, and you're being supportive of each other, then you'll get through creating and implementing a policy like this one.
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