I was glad to speak on this topic and honored to be mentioned with industry thought leaders Alan Pelz-Sharpe, analyst and director at The Real Story Group, and Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

From what I’ve seen, about eight out of ten insurers are lacking in e-discovery. Some have document management strategies that are little more than a glorified file share system. Insurers need to understand that if they don’t have unstructured data under control, they’ll spend millions more on e-discovery when there’s legal action involved.

For more on this topic, click here to read the article or pick up the October 2010 issue of Tech Decisions.

As the life sciences industry is constantly battling to keep up with ever-evolving standards of CFR 22 Part 11, SOX, HIPAA, ISO, etc., there is a critical need to improve efficiency and proactively prepare for litigation. Sitrof and StoredIQ’s eDiscovery Preparedness solution make it easy to comply with internal and external regulations through a highly customizable, auditable data topology map of active electronically stored information files and emails that are located on network servers, email servers, content management systems, storage systems and PC’s. By utilizing this solution, organizations in the life sciences industry can respond with unprecedented levels of speed and accuracy to legal discovery and compliance requirements.

Sitrof is extremely pleased with this partnership, as well as being named the exclusive VAR for StoredIQ. Sitrof is confident that StoredIQ’s solution is the industry best for helping organizations make better legal decisions, effectively prepare for Rule 26(f) “meet & confer” conferences, protect against process attacks and sanctions for under-producing, respond quickly and accurately to legal discovery and compliance requirements and reduce risk. Coupled with Sitrof’s experienced implementation team, organizations can expect tremendous cost cutting, pro-active and re-active benefits, such as: automating processes, improving efficiency and dramatically reducing cost.

As long as the trouble seemed limited to managing storage, then it was a problem the corporation was content to live with. No one was particularly concerned about what was contained within all of that digital storage, and over time even the original owners of this electronic content forgot about it or moved on. So IT made do with additional storage devices and long-term tape-based retention. But then the eDiscovery process blew up in corporate faces, and the problem of unstructured data management blew up right along with it. eDiscovery morphed from a cost-of-doing-business process – and a great way for outside law firms to make a lot of money – into a quagmire of missed deadlines, sanctions, and multi-million dollar review costs.

Then the financial meltdown came along to complete the disaster, turning the regulatory atmosphere from complacent to threatening. The first change threatened the General Counsel’s office (GC); the second change threatened the Governance, Risk, and Compliance officers (GRC). These groups are starting to look to IT to fix the problem, but IT cannot do it alone. What this difficult situation needs is a technology that cost-effectively manages enterprise-wide unstructured data, and then customizes data delivery and actions for specific business processes. Its primary driver is the eDiscovery process, but the common platform enables effective management for GRC and storage management as well. In this Technology in Brief, we will share our take on the promise of these platforms, and how StoredIQ is fulfilling that promise.

Read this E-Discovery Round table discussion featuring Sitrof Managing Partner, Bryan Reynolds

The StoredIQ eDiscovery Preparedness solution creates a highly customizable, auditable data topology map of active electronically stored information (ESI) files and emails that are located on network servers, email servers, content management systems, storage systems, and PC's. The data topology map is ideal for helping organizations better prepare for FRCP Rule 26(f) conferences. The solution performs a system crawl, collecting all data without disrupting the business. Furthermore, it is deployed and maintained in-house, increasing the level of protection of your organization's sensitive data.

The eDiscovery Process Flow encompasses awareness, early case assessment, data preservation, data topology reporting, meet and confer preparation and review preparation. The on-going, proactive activities are comprised of continually indexing unstructured data; monitoring, viewing and analyzing data; and applying records management policies to reduce the amount of data retained. Awareness includes reasonably anticipating litigation and any formal communications needed for opposing counsels. In the early case assessment phase, relevant data sources are identified and reviewed to recognize source correspondence as well as the scope and amount of data to be collected and preserved. In this phase, email attributes are used to reconstruct threads, and deep attribute and content query functionality are used to identify relevant custodians and custodian relevant data in shared locations. The early case assessment is concluded with collection/preservation tagging to verify one's search results by reviewing relevant metadata, email, and document content. Preservation is an easy, single click process that renders powerful results. In this process chain, custody, authenticity, and original, full-object path information are all preserved and properly maintained in an audit log of the collection. The audit log is maintained by creating a hash value before and after data collection. Data topology reporting creates an auditable map of active ESI files and emails for potentially responsive data, with full analytic reporting. Topology maps and query reports help prepare organizations for the meet and confer phase by compiling all data under preservation, including key word analysis reports across all custodian data. Lastly, key review preparation functionality includes the ability to generate a review load file of all responsive items negotiated in the meet and confer, data de-duplication, container file capabilities, automatic prefixing, automated rolling productions, and load file support for many litigation review platforms.

Clearly this solution eliminates the risks associated with legal discovery, records retention, privacy, security, and illegal and irrelevant content in organizations with unmanaged, unstructured information. Compliance becomes a matter of ease with effective information policy management as well as detailed, reportable knowledge of what information is stored and where it is located. Not only does this solution enable organizations to comply with policies and regulations before litigation, but it also dramatically reduces costs often associated with the discovery of ESI (including document collection from inaccessible locations, massive volume storage, unanticipated legal risk, spoliation risk, quantitative per-document review cost, and document delivery).

If your organization is struggling to keep up with compliance, governance, and legal discovery requirements, please contact Sitrof today for a free on-site assessment.