Many organizations look first to technology to solve their information management challenges. Yet simply deploying an e-mail archive, an ECM system, or more disk storage is seldom the answer. Effective and legally compliant management of records and information instead requires that organizations:
- Identify and categorize their information
- Understand and manage their information repositories (paper and data, internal and external, including the cloud)
- Understand and manage how their information is disseminated
- Establish legally valid retention periods and ensure compliant and timely disposal of information in the ordinary course of business
- Establish sound records and information management practices as an ongoing business process discipline
Records retention and management in the ordinary course of business must also dovetail with privacy and data security compliance, and with effective management of legal hold processes in advance of litigation and governmental proceedings.
Our Information Governance group helps clients have a firmer grasp on their records and other data in the ordinary course of business.
We also enable clients to align ordinary course of business records and data management with discovery readiness, putting them ahead of the curve when litigation or governmental investigations arise.
Records Retention: We help clients create and validate compliant records retention scheduling. Our expertise and resources include our proprietary database of over 56,000 records retention legal requirements and legal considerations from the U.S. Federal System and each of the 50 states. We build on that foundation with industry and client-specific custom research. Our legal validation work is compatible with various approaches to retention schedule structure, including big or small buckets and legal group frameworks. We can help clients establish their record series structure, and we also assist clients with retention schedule implementation and deployment. To allow our clients to accurately predict cost, we generally offer these services on a project scope, fixed fee basis.
Records and Information Management Policies: We create, update, or strengthen policies and processes for records management, records disposition, imaging and other records media conversion, e-communications usage, cloud computing and social media. Our "clear language" commitment helps to facilitate both training and compliance.
Legal Hold Processes: We help clients create, update, or strengthen existing legal hold systems for more reliable and predictable results in preservation compliance and in managing e-discovery transactional costs. A robust, client-specific process addresses the legal hold lifecycle, from the trigger point to the hold release, and also allows paper and data to be managed across multiple holds.
Information Asset Mapping: Our proprietary information asset mapping, unlike data mapping services currently in vogue, is grounded in the realities of how in-house decisions are actually made by general counsel and information technology and records management personnel while executing legal hold processes. Through in-person interviews with key stakeholders, our information asset mapping captures crucial information about key data storage locations, data types, and media, as well as information about the organizational practices that impact such data. We then distill that information into a focused, robust, and readily useable resource for legal hold decision-making.
Legacy Data Management: Unfettered accumulation of legacy and orphaned data is one of the largest, and growing, cost components of both ordinary course records management and e-discovery. We help clients with legally defensible processes to identify, inventory and triage (retain, preserve or compliantly dispose of) back up tapes and orphaned or other legacy data sources.
SharePoint 2010 for RIM: We help clients focus on and resolve key records and information management issues for SharePoint 2010 implementation, including such matters as the scope of SharePoint use, development of a governance model, use of records management features, file plan preparation, and guidance regarding content types and master metadata services.
