electronic discovery   consulting     >  discovery plans >  FRCP compliance >  litigation readiness >  litigation response strategies >  lit support dept. audits >  ED Educational Programs   DocHunter   project management   forensics   paper discovery	Corporate Litigation Readiness Assessment Even if you have never had to produce an electronic file before in litigation, you must expect in the near future you will be asked to do just that. You will also be asked to make sure you preserve potentially relevant electronically stored information (ESI”). When you go to the table to discuss a discovery plan for your litigation, understanding your own ESI inventory gives you leverage to negotiate an agreement that best serves your interests. Your exposure for failing to take the necessary steps to correctly identify, preserve, collect and produce responsive ESI is big. It may seem like a mistake made in a high profile case will not happen to you, but if it does, you risk monetary sanctions, adverse inference instructions, the inability to put key witnesses on the stand and in egregious cases, a default judgment. You may consider your ability to respond to a request for ESI as a mere housekeeping matter, but the volume of ESI in your “possession, custody and control” grows almost invisibly. Your IT department buys bigger servers that hold more data, your employees get workstations with bigger hard drives and unless you have policies and practices in place that manage the growth, distribution and storage of this data, you may find yourself nearly paralyzed by the decision of where to start the next time you have to respond to an electronic discovery request. Unless you put a Litigation Response Plan in place, you will find yourself repeating a time consuming, disruptive and expensive exercise with each new request. If you fail to be proactive about meeting this challenge head on, your costs for procrastinating will eat up human resources and your bottom line. A Daegis consultant can work with you to provide the focus and forward momentum needed to get you through the assessment phase as efficiently as possible. You can rely on Daegis experts to conduct a cohesive analysis of your real world practices that will identify areas of risk, inefficiency and high cost. The first step in creating a business process for managing electronic discovery is a Litigation Readiness Assessment which requires you to do the following: Identify Key Personnel and Business Units It is essential to know which individuals in which part of your organization have a role to play in responding to electronic discovery requests. Your IT director may be the first person opposing counsel wants to depose, but it may be some very junior employee who knows that the written back up protocol is not the company practice. Whether they are legal, IT, administrative or operations players, we recognize the need to drill down through the ranks to identify the people that are doing the work that matters in responding to discovery requests. Data Map ESI is ubiquitous in today’s business world. It resides on the familiar employee workstation and on network servers, but it may also be found on your digital copier, your voicemail system and on the Bernoulli disks gathering dust in the IT secure storage area. Demonstrate to your opponent and the court the good faith effort you applied in responding to a discovery request by creating a data map. As part of our assessment we will determine what in-house resources you have that may serve as a foundation for a data map. If you have already completed the data mapping effort, we will evaluate your procedure for keeping the map up to date. If you do not yet have a data map, each new litigation provides the opportunity to begin the process so you will not find yourself in the middle of another fire drill when the next complaint is filed. Whether you decide to approach data mapping incrementally or globally, you will find the time your team spends looking for ESI will drastically decrease and so will your costs. Data mapping services are offered as part of our Corporate Litigation Response Strategy analysis. Collect Documentation There is no question that opposing counsel will ask you to produce your written policies regarding back up schedules, e-mail retention and document management. But a surprising number of organizations cannot readily access these documents and have never reviewed them for purposes of understanding their impact on discovery response efforts. Compilation and analysis of applicable documentation puts you one giant step ahead of the game. Document Existing Practices Before you can determine whether your existing litigation response strategy is legally defensible, you have to understand how you are currently managing the process. We document your current strategy so it can be evaluated and improved upon. Assessment Report As a final step, we provide you with a detailed Litigation Assessment Report that gives you a comprehensive view of your current status and includes recommendations for changes to implement electronic discovery best practices. Let’s go forward.