Can you take the stand and defend that you’re “litigation ready”?

As we all know, for today’s organizations, it’s not a question of “if” but “when” they will be involved in litigation.  None the less, most organizations are still unprepared for such an event.   A fact that was driven home at LegalTech where the results of a survey on litigation readiness was presented.  According to this post from eDiscovery Canada, only 60% of records management policies contain a litigation readiness component, and only 20% of those utilized litigation readiness software.  The question is, where would your organization fall if you participated in this survey?

So let’s do a little role playing.  Imagine you’re taking the stand to defend your company’s litigation readiness solution in front of a jury made up of the board of directors and with the CEO as judge. We’ve put together the following questions, a “cross examination” of sorts, to help you rate your litigation readiness:

• How are you reducing the risk of spoliation?
• Can you proactively identify and destroy unnecessary documents while retaining the right ones?
• Can you ensure that valuable business information is safe and accessible to authorized personnel only?
• Are you containing storage costs while streamlining access to critical information?
• Are you able to preempt litigation by proactively identifying and securing documents as required by law and by flagging content that may be out of compliance with business policies or regulations?

If you could answer yes to all of these questions and also explain your policies and the technologies you use then you would pass.  If not, you might need a lawyer in the future!  :  )

By implementing proactive, litigation-ready response capabilities, organizations can: reduce the risk of government fines, court sanctions and negative verdicts; contain the cost of eDiscovery; and make better, faster legal decisions based on real-time information about data.

So how prepared are you for litigation? For more information on StoredIQ’s litigation readiness solution, check our solution brief, here.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 12th, 2010 at 9:51 am and is filed under information management, litigation readiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.