Presentations/Proceedings

Discussion leaders Liz Schimmel from Halliburton, Tina Gibson from Devon Energy, Deidre Paknad, CGOC founder, and Amir Alavi of Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Anaipakos P.C. discussed strategies and practical advice to reduce legal hold mis-steps, get every efficiency possible in preservation and discovery, apply case and discovery strategies that lower litigation costs, and identify and address the root causes of high ediscovery costs.

Like many companies, Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis is planning to migrate some data to a "dedicated cloud" environment. Pam Roberts, Head of Legal Data Services, shares the diligence checklist she used to identify challenges and related solutions for electronic discovery in this environment.

This meeting featured discussion leaders Robert Levy of ExxonMobil, Tina Gibson of Devon Energy, Deidre Paknad, CGOC founder, and Amir Alavi of Ahmad, Zavitsanos & Anaipakos P.C.. They discussed strategies and practical advice to reduce legal hold mis-steps in light of Judge Rosenthal's Rimkus decision and Judge Schiendlin's Pension decision, best manage a sudden increase in incoming requests and claims, get every efficiency possible in preservation and discovery to scale strained staff yet ensure a rigorous process, prevent oversight and error with internal process controls and transparency between legal and IT, and efficiently monitor your discovery process to control cost and mitigate risk.

The CGOC RIM working group meeting featured a discussion on doing information inventories across business units and departments. The meeting was appropriate for RIM staff and legal and IT staff working on data source map initiatives.

Kim Borzick, Legal eDiscovery IT Manager at Abbott, shares her processes and experience in rigorous, efficient data collections.

The IMRM is as important in information governance as EDRM has been in ediscovery. Get an introduction to the Information Management Reference Model to learn more about how it can galvanize dialogue and action across legal, RIM and IT stakeholders.

January 20-21, 2010

Adapting to Changing Facts: From Best Practice to Next Practice
for RIGOROUS DISCOVERY and DEFENSIBLE DISPOSAL

See what leaders from ExxonMobil, Travelers, Novartis, Bank of America, Abbott and others have to say about Information Governance!

The Discipline of the Decade

Case studies from Abbott, FDC, Williams, PwC and more on reducing discovery and data management costs.

Ralph Shalom, Assistant General Counsel, First Data Corporation

Cost is the central consideration in the “fight or settle” analysis but good forecasts are rarely available so resolution decisions are made later or negotiation opportunities are lost. This session focuses on decision making and compelling cost shifting arguments to reduce litigation costs.

Traditional approaches to controlling discovery costs include negotiating rates with outside counsel and vendors. In this session, practice leaders provided insight into partnering and collaborating with outside counsel and vendors to control and reduce litigation costs.

Tom Lahiff, Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers

Cost is the central consideration in the “fight or settle” analysis but good forecasts are rarely available so resolution decisions are made later or negotiation opportunities are lost. This session focuses on decision making and compelling cost shifting arguments to reduce litigation costs.

Deidre Paknad, President & CEO, PSS Systems

Over the past few years, e-discovery has ballooned to over 50% of litigation costs only to have matters settle 97% of the time. Discovery cost has gone from a small portion to the vast majority of litigation cost, but cost forecasting practices haven’t kept pace with this sea change. This session focuses on the changing dynamics and how your litigation process can be modernized to incorporate continuous cost control, routinely identify opportunities to do less e-discovery and control fiscal period cost impacts.

Paige Cole, Legal Specialist, The Williams Companies

The root cause of high discovery costs is too much data, however the only way to defensibly and reliable dispose of data is to ensure that Legal, IT, and Records are aligned. This case study will provide best practices and processes for defensibly disposing of data.

Complete proceedings from the 5th annual CGOC Summit - Reducing the Heavy Footprint of Legal Duties on the Corporate Bottom Line. Guest experts at the Summit included Travelers, Citigroup, First Data Corporation, GE, AlixPartners, Connolly Bove Lodge & Hutz, Ryley Carlock & Applewhite, American Express, BP, Hunton & Williams, Capital One, Novartis Corporation, Huron Consulting Group, Abbott Laboratories, and more.

Richard Gomes, Senior Vice President, IT Risk, Citigroup

A good retention program not only ensures business records are retained properly, it helps identify where information is stored in the corporation and ensures that expired data is disposed properly. This session will focus on developing and quantifying the business case for an effective program can help the legal department, business groups and senior management appreciate the cost of their current retention practices and the savings improvement will bring.

Deidre Paknad, President & CEO, PSS Systems; Founder, CGOC

Today every company manages legal holds to mitigate risk, but how they do so has a huge impact on the corporate bottom line. With tough economic conditions, the choices the Legal department makes for how and what to preserve and retain are critical. This session will look at retention and preservation practices and their relative cost footprints and offer ways to take a "greener" approach.

Jay Brudz, Senior Corporate Counsel, GE

Implementing good retention practices and information hygiene is often met with resistance from business groups and even the legal department. By calculating the true loaded cost of information to the corporation -- including the cost to manage, discover and litigate it -- companies can make much better cost/benefit decisions. Moreover, transparently allocating the real cost of information can reduce unnecessary discovery budget surprises improve allocation of discovery costs.

Thomas Lahiff, Director, Pricewaterhouse Coopers

Using 100% retention as a legal holds solution is perhaps the most expensive approach to preservation; as the data builds up, it may not mitigate as much risk as expected and it significantly increases operating and discovery costs. Very often, litigation executives disregard retention schedules in favor of holding everything because they worry about spoliation or doubt the integrity of the retention schedule itself. Legally-based retention schedules combined with a good legal holds process are possible and can be used to effectively defend against claims of spoliation. This session will look at the processes to develop legally-sound retention and preservation programs for the best offense and best defense.

Dan Kulakofsky, Managing Counsel, eDiscovery, Travelers

Good legal holds practices are a pre-requisite for improvements in retention practices and data management efficiency. This session will highlight how to define a new process, galvanize a large or distributed legal team to change old habits, gain management and staff support, and roll out a new program.

Alexandra Buck, Senior Counsel and Director of eDiscovery and Retention Management, Abbott Laboratories

A strong partnership and robust process across Legal and IT is critical to preserve and collect relevant information and to dispose of expired data. The high volume of information and its distribution can make IT the Achilles Heel. This case study will cover building strong partnerships and strong processes that link Legal and IT and enable better legal governance of information.

This working group focused on the IT and legal departments challenges' in preserving, collecting, and managing data in a complex corporate setting.  Both departments need to be in lock step because the legal department has the obligations while IT has the data.  The materials include discussion cards and key takeaways.

Managing legal holds has become increasingly complex.  For companies in high tech, global or data-intensive environments, it's particularly difficult to track the people and systems that fall under legal hold.  Relying on permanent retention of all data just shifts the enormous legal burden to IT without commensurate controls and transparency.  This half day CGOC event focused specifically on this challenge.

In this working group, two key conflicts were explored to help legal departments reduce risk and cost.  The first conflict was the inherent differences in IT and Legal department points of view and processes which presents a tremendous challenge to preserving data efficiently and reliably.  The second conflict was the conflict of law between US discovery obligations and EU privacy laws.  With specific prohibitions against searching and transporting employee and customer data, companies have very tough choices when US litigation or discovery encompasses data beyond our shores.

The complete proceedings from the 4th Annual CGOC June Workshop - The Intersection of Privacy, Discovery and Retention Obligations.  Featuring guest experts from BP, GE, Citigroup, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Seyfarth Shaw and more.

The complete proceedings from the CGOC Spring Series 2008 - The State of the Art in Legal Holds & Retention, featuring case studies from Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Travelers, and more.

Tom Lahiff, Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Former Assistant General Counsel, Citigroup

Determining when litigation is reasonably anticipated continues to be a challenge in large, complex companies. While fact specific, there are a number of circumstances that are consistent triggers for legal holds. Because your decision making will be scrutinized through the lens of hindsight, establishing the basis for you policies and decision making are essential to defending the choices made. Tom will address legal hold triggers and discuss the consequences of failure to initiate holds early or broadly enough. This session will look at relevant cases, decision making challenges, and policy documentation issues.

Dan Kulakofsky, Managing Counsel and Director of eDiscovery, Travelers

For the companies that are just beginning their legal holds process, tips from someone that has already gone through it are invaluable. This case study provides the lessons learned as Travelers implemented their preservation program as well as offers guidance and “what we would have done different” advice.

Harry Pugh, Executive Vice President, Operations & Technology Policy Coordinator, Citigroup

Citigroup began its global retention program several years ago for risk management and compliance purposes and today it has one of the very few effective enterprise retention management programs in operation. The program has driven strategic benefits by enabling the company to disposition legacy data, normalize data management, and drive out waste.

Kathy Harris, Managing Director, Discovery and Regulatory Response Team, Merrill Lynch

An analysis of the trajectory of strategic change over the last 24 months, process and practice accomplishments and work yet to be done. This case study includes a thoughtful review of typical organizational and operational barriers and the opportunities in retention and discovery that the future holds.

Eric Saltzman, CFO, PSS Systems

Predicting discovery costs using a "litigation funnel" methodology -- the same techniques applied to sales forecasting. Corporate legal teams have a wealth of data on the likelihood of matters progressing through various stages of litigation, the volume of potentially discoverable information associated with various types of matters and the costs associated with culling, reviewing and producing information. Using this data in conjunction with a dedicated tool for managing the "litigation funnel" will yield better predictability on discovery costs, improve visibility on the timing and nature of those costs, and the ability to reduce expenses.