Important Reference Information for Legal Holds
October 16, 2007 — As you continue to evaluate your legal holds process for completeness and efficiency, there are several recently published guidelines that you should consider:
Maryland Discovery Guidelines
Led by Judge Grimm, a speaker at our June workshop for legal and IT executives, the Maryland guidelines are very thorough and somewhat prescriptive on the procedures companies should undertake to preserve and collect information in litigation. Judge Grimm is well versed in e-discovery, very active in the broader legal community like Sedona and Georgetown Ediscovery Institute, and is well respected by his peers on the bench. As a result, while only guidelines, the Maryland guidelines are likely to receive genuine reading and consideration far beyond the beltway.
Sedona Conference Legal Hold Guidelines for Public Comment
Over the past year, the legal holds team under the Sedona Conference has worked on a set of workable guidelines for legal holds. The draft is now available for public comment and consideration. The document provides scenarios and discussion on hold triggers, scope issues, collecting to preserve, and collecting from individual custodians.
Preservation Benchmarks for 2007 and Beyond
The challenges of preservation go well beyond sending and managing hold notices since the disclosure requirements were added to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. While there is no bullet-proof preservation process, there are a number of benchmarks for a good process that provide the controls needed for confidence. This document addresses these challenges and the processes needed to overcome them.
Evaluating your Record Retention Program when your Company “Reasonably Anticipates” Filing Litigation
Written by Kevin Brady, Partner of Business Law Group at Connolly Bove Lodge & Hutz LLP, this article looks at retention and legal holds together by examining Rambus, Inc. v. Infineon Techs. AG (2004) and Hynix Semiconductor Inc. v. Rambus, Inc. (2006). Valuable lessons can be learned about retention and preservation by taking a closer look at the Rambus cases.
While all of these documents are important and broad reaching, they may not provide enough guidance in managing ongoing preservation duties for data sources and systems. The upcoming CGOC events on Data Source Synchronization for Preservation, Discovery and Retention provide a view on how to create a more functional inventory and factors systems and sources into ongoing preservation to reduce risks. Of course, looking at retention and preservation as the interdependent processes they are is critical; the 2008 Summit focuses — as always — on the intersection.