Information Management and Electronic Discovery

The Challenge: Every Employee a Warehouse

A generation into the personal computer era, businesses have discovered that electronic communications have placed up to a warehouse of information on the desktop of each employee. The challenge for businesses, particularly those in heavily-regulated or litigious industries, is to control the time and costs of identifying and retrieving relevant information from these mini-warehouses. Frost Brown Todd works with clients to meet these challenges both with front-end solutions to control the creation and management of records, and with cost-effective teamwork to identify and analyze relevant information when necessary to litigation or other proceedings.

The Front-end Solution: Records Management

FBT’s Information Management & e-Discovery (“IMeD”) group works with clients to design and implement record retention management programs that comply with the specific legal and business conditions facing each particular client. With literally hundreds of possibly applicable retention periods, and scores of legal requirements or business conditions affecting how information should be retained, it is necessary to tailor records management programs to the needs of each client. Within the last year alone, FBT’s IMeD group has counseled clients in the insurance, banking, publishing, nonprofit, and health care sectors.

A sound records management program, particularly one that integrates electronic records into our client’s operating structure, pays large dividends in litigation or other proceedings. In our experience, a sound program allows management and counsel to pinpoint quickly the business departments and significant individuals likely to have relevant information. This saves significant amounts of both time and money, by excluding irrelevant departments and datastores from a pending matter. On the other hand, a sound program also will allow management and counsel to respond quickly if the scope of a proceeding changes.

The Litigation Solution: Controlling Document Search & Review Costs

When matters proceed from business to litigation or other proceedings, FBT has more than 20 years’ experience in the use of staff attorneys, paralegals and clerical personnel to minimize the costs of document review. Even in the best-managed records management programs, most of the possibly “relevant” information is likely to be insignificant to resolving the specific issues at hand. By using staff attorneys, paralegals and even specially-trained clerical personnel for preliminary document review, FBT’s review group is able to funnel the most relevant information to the litigation team or other decisionmakers for significantly less than standard hourly rates.

During the last five years, additional review tools have become available in the forms of computer-assisted searching, and review by offshore contract personnel. FBT has worked with both of these resources, and both may provide additional time- and cost-saving advantages in appropriate situations. For computer-assisted (or “augmented”) searching, both the technology and consulting provider(s) must be measured against the types of information in question, and need for precision in a particular case, because computer-assisted search techniques may sacrifice accuracy for maximum rate of review. Offshore resources must be vetted for reliability, and agreements must include appropriate assurances of compliance with applicable U.S. law (such as HIPAA or Gramm-Leach-Bliley) as well as supervisory requirements of U.S. legal ethics rules.

FBT Solutions Build Upon Proven Success

In applying these capabilities, FBT’s IMeD Group builds upon its history of superior litigation support. From 1992 to 2005, FBT supplied staff paralegals and attorneys for a tobacco company to assist in the discovery phase of tobacco litigation conducted across the country. The tobacco team’s initial task was to collect and review documents for various productions. Each document review included screening for confidentiality, trade secret, and privilege. The tobacco team ultimately collected, reviewed, and produced hardcopies of approximately 25 million pages in over 100 cases in jurisdictions throughout the country and all over the world. The team also managed the storage and retrieval of over 80,000 boxes of hardcopy documents and media.

Representative Experience

• Pre-screened more than 600gb (equivalent to more than 12 million pages) of raw data for personal jurisdiction and subject-matter relevance in less than 90 days. This reduced the volume of information provided to the litigation team by more than 90%, and saved more than $1,000,000 in client expense compared to traditional review methods or commercial alternatives.
• Performed responsiveness & privilege review of more than 2.2 million documents in less than 90 days. Use of native-format review & repository produced client savings exceeding $250,000, compared either to traditional review methods or commercial alternatives.
• Performed responsiveness & privilege review of more than 300,000 pages of documents from 21 server & local hard drives in less than 30 days, including review of image & multimedia data types which cannot be handled through typical keyword searching.
• Advised clients in bidding process & negotiation with service providers to establish multi-party document repository for consolidated discovery in nationwide class action litigation.
• Performed fixed-fee assessment & advice on updating an insurer’s records retention policy, including comprehensive review of formal records classifications & related retention periods
• Analyzed records management program for financial services company, including review & assessment of both retention schedules and disposal practices for compliance with Gramm-Leach-Bliley as well as state secure disposal laws
• Advised manufacturing company on conforming specific document retention schedule to actual business practices and litigation profile, beyond minimum statutory and regulatory requirementsAll businesses run on information. Maintaining information in a safe, organized, searchable and useable system is now a business imperative. Frost Brown Todd provides a business resource that can help ensure that sensitive data is properly maintained by developing document retention and management programs for clients of every size and in every industry.