Well maybe this isn’t totally related to Cloud computing but I had to get the latest IT catch phrase in there somewhere right? Law.com posted an article yesterday that raises the question of what to do when your hosted e-discovery vendor has financial problems and either puts their company on the market to be sold or files for bankruptcy.
If you use a hosted e-discovery vendor this could be a huge issue. If you have a pending e-discovery request and your hosted e-discovery vendor either delays producing the data, refuses to, or can’t produce the data at all then your company may be liable. The article states that relying on a hosted e-discovery vendor that becomes insolvent presents some of the following risks:
· Lost data
· Missed deadlines
· Starting over with a new vendor
· No support
The article also states that there are some things you can do to help mitigate the risks. Be careful when creating contracts with a hosted vendor. Make sure that the contract protects you in the case that the company becomes insolvent. The contract should contain provisions that allow you to access your data immediately in case the company is sold, goes into bankruptcy, or the contract is terminated.
You can also negotiate regular dumps of your ESI to a local repository stored in-house to help mitigate the risk. I happen to believe that this is the safest method to protect from risk and I think that an Archive is the easiest way to do this. Email data can be journaled to two locations so why not journal to a local archive as well as your hosted e-discovery vendor. Keeping a copy of this data locally protects you from losing your data or missing court deadlines if that e-discovery vendor ceases to exist. If the worst happens the local copy of the data can be turned over to a new e-discovery vendor or can be searched by the in-house discovery or legal team to produce the data.
The article mentioned can be found here: http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202429299940
Technorati Tags:
E-discovery, Email Archiving, Compliance, Hosting, Hosted Discovery
