This Friday the eyes of the world will shift to London as Prince William and Kate Middleton will marry.  Their wedding will be seen by billions around the world and will be the most glamorous event since the wedding of William’s parents, Charles and Diana, thirty years ago.

While the pomp and pageantry will focus on His Royal Highness and Kate, behind the scenes hundreds of workers will tend to the details of the royal affair.  Caterers, florists and the wedding dress designers have been working secretly on the wedding for months.  All vendors chosen by the bride, groom and Buckingham Palace and have been sworn to secrecy to ensure that no details of the royal nuptials leak out to the public.

In many ways companies involved in eDiscovery have the same requirements as the royal couple.  They have very specific needs, incredibly difficult timelines, little margin for error, and the results of the eDiscovery matter will be highly scrutinized.  Companies conducting eDiscovery must surround themselves with a group of trusted partners that can help balance the workload, provide useful expertise, integrate their roles and responsibilities with those of the internal team and perform quickly and flawlessly when called upon. 

Everything about the royal wedding will be scrutinized – from how the event is executed to the way jewels are sewn onto the future Queen’s dress.  Every detail will be remembered forever by William and Kate, as well as their followers around the world. The royal couple will set a new standard for wedding elegance that will no doubt be emulated by brides throughout the world. 

The results of eDiscovery matters will also live on forever and will be scrutinized by the court and opposing counsel.  The eDiscovery process, and the results, must be as close to flawless as possible because if they aren’t it will affect the outcome of the matter at hand and set precedence that could impact many cases to come.

(photo credit: Aleksandr Kutsayev)

Today is Earth Day and more than a billion people from 180 countries will come together to raise awareness of Earth’s delicate (and deteriorating) ecosystem. The first Earth Day took place in 1970 to provide a forum for people to express concern about what’s happening to the planet – from air and water quality to energy utilization and depletion. 

Earth Day draws attention to responsibly enacting resource conservation strategies through the implementation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Reduce, Reuse, Recycle program. The goal of the program is to reduce the amount and toxicity of trash that is thrown away; reuse containers and product; recycle as much as possible; purchase products with recycled content; and practice composting organic waste. These simple steps toward waste prevention and recycling help reduce the carbon footprint (greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and distribution processes), which ultimately contributes to global climate change.

What does this have to do with eDiscovery? Well, the basic principles of reducing, reusing, and recycling can be applied to the rampant practice of over-preserving electronically stored information (ESI). This practice is not only a wasteful use of time, money and server resources, it increases the carbon footprint of IT operating environments. To put it in perspective, the Gartner Group estimates that servers, PCs, monitors, printers and other IT assets emit as much CO2 as the worldwide airline industry; and IT CO2 emissions are growing at a much faster pace.

To reduce the amount of energy that is being used (and emitted) to run IT systems, companies should have data retention policies that not only ensure compliance with legal holds and regulatory laws but also reduce the amount of data that is saved and managed unnecessarily.  They need to have clear policies that avoid keeping backups of backups of backups, which results in exponential growth of data.  A solid retention policy should look something like this:

• Legal and IT work collaboratively to the identify, locate, deduplicate and preserve any potentially relevant ESI;
• Litigation hold notices and instructions for the preservation of ESI should be distributed to the custodians of potentially relevant ESI; and
• The steps taken to prevent the destruction of potentially relevant ESI should be documented.

Let’s give Mother Earth a hand and stop over-preserving ESI.

Does your company have clearly defined retention policies? Are your company backups busting at the seams?

Share your thoughts.

(Photo credit: Sujin Jetkasettakorn)