As we head into the new year, below are some enlightening FRCP trends on how organizations are choosing to deal with searching electronic documents.
One-fifth of companies surveyed admit that their business has opted to settle a lawsuit to avoid the cost of recovering and searching through electronic documents.
47% of respondents also admit being uncertain that their legal team can effectively review relevant e-mail in the 99-day window allowed under the law.
51% say they have implemented or are planning to implement search and review technology for e-mail.
37% are already enforcing a formal retention policy for e-mail, while another 40% are currently in the planning stage to enforce a formal policy.
Another 36% of respondents are currently planning to create and enforce a formal “litigation hold” process for e-mail and other data.
37% of respondents conduct more than 21 searches through old e-mail to gather information for legal reasons each year.
Nearly half of respondents (40%) report that their organization searches through e-mail five or more times each year in response to a formal legal discovery request.
35% are not confident that e-mails are fully reviewed to ensure attorney-client privilege is not waived before being sent to opposing counsel during discovery.
Of those who are familiar with the costs of litigation, more than half (51%) claimed the average cost of litigation (excluding settlement costs) was over $200,000, with 8% putting the average cost over $1 million.
The world-wide financial systems’ near-collapse will certainly spur new legislation requiring more oversight and reporting about transactions and relationships between the different financial sectors. There will also likely be an uptick in lawsuits and investigations, and a need to know “who said what when” to figure out the truth trail. This is when an email archiving solution can provide actionable intelligence.