Preparing for e-Discovery in SharePoint

http://ow.ly/73Cje

An article by Tom McCaffery posted on the cioupdate.com website.

This article discusses eDiscovery issues that are specific to dealing with a corporate I.T. environment in which Sharepoint is being used as an enterprise content management system.

The author states, "A solution like SharePoint provides a number of benefits for organizations, including real-time collaboration, decreased costs and improved operational efficiency. However, as more companies turn to this platform for business critical collaboration and document retention, they face profound new challenges related to e-discovery demands."

The author further states, "...if an organization is coordinating with an archive or other information governance solution, it can decide what types of electronically stored information (ESI) can be kept and for how long. Ultimately, though, not all of the content stored on the SharePoint server will be relevant for e-discovery. In that sense, SharePoint is similar to e-mail -- there are only certain items which are truly relevant."

The article discusses the need to set up folders and sites that set retention periods for content, and that indicates who the owner of the document is.  As the author goes on to state, "Once the SharePoint site structure is established, next comes the task of determining who owns the data within the platform. Identification of data ownership is important for e-discovery, since some of the data owners may ultimately become custodians in a matter or investigation."

The article discusses the complexities involved in who actually "owns" the data. In addition, the article mentions the importance of metadata preservation for eDiscovery purposes.  Furthermore the article provides some tips on how to effectively deal with discovery requests, when potential litigation arises.  As the author states, "Some tools allow organizations to crawl through an archive and extract specific information. Some have the ability to do a proximity search, so, for example, you can look for the word “discovery” +/- any other specific words before or after it. More advanced discovery services provide the ability to search by concepts, instead of just keywords.

These systems take advantage of full text indexing of content and metadata and then apply advanced linguistic algorithms to identify relevant content. Some tools take this process a step further, allowing review attorneys to classify documents from within the review set which then trains the software to efficiently classify other documents accordingly."