IT Guidance to the Legal Team

Technology can be a great tool to simplify a process or increase the output of existing processes. Despite this, Information Technology (IT) teams must be cautious when implementing new technology into their environment because this can also increase their liability of information retrieval if a lawsuit is filed against them. Rarely if ever is an enterprise application, such as e-discovery software, ready to go out of the box. Most enterprise applications of scale require months of planning, negotiations, architecture discussions, engineering consultation, cross-divisional resource allocation, and process redesign to accommodate the software. Information security and IT teams, knowledgeable of this fact should interface with their legal teams prior to ideation of implementing an enterprise e-discovery tool. Just having a tool and not a defined process to effectively manage, correlate, extract, and secure subpoenaed data can leave a company exposed to multiple financial and legal repercussions. An example of this was seen with the case of Morgan Stanley vs. Ronald Perelman where "Morgan Stanley was hit with a $1.75 billion jury verdict, which hinged primarily on the company's lax e-discovery procedures." (Cummings, 2007)