Five Email and Document Management Strategies Key to Reducing Litigation Costs, Improving Preparation
New Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Amendments Require New Records Management, Litigation Readiness Strategies
Chicago, IL - 2007-03-15 - Smoking-gun documents and emails have been at the heart of the world s best known corporate legal battles, but the risks of information in litigation have suddenly grown with new U.S. Federal guidelines for e-discovery. How can companies get a handle on the exploding volume of online content to better address the costs and risks of litigation? Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC), a leading provider of software that helps companies manage their growing stores of emails and documents, today released a list of five key technology strategies for litigation and e-discovery readiness that can help companies be as prepared in the courtroom as in the boardroom.
The constant stream of headlines on corporate courtroom dramas has increased the pressure to address the litigation risks of electronic information, said Timothy Carroll, co-chair of the records management practice at Vedder Price, a leading business law firm based in Chicago with a large litigation and e-discovery practice. With the recent e-discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, companies need to get better prepared and build an ability to address discovery orders directly into their information systems.
Companies are now expected to know where their information or their records live, how they can get to them, where they re stored, and who has access to them. Companies that aren t able to answer those four or five basic questions are going to be at a disadvantage very early in litigation, Carroll cautions. The challenges are huge, like an elephant in the corner of the room, but you cannot digest it in one fell swoop, instead you need to start with one bite at a time.
Open Text Executive Vice President Bill Forquer sees some advantages in the new rules. Certainly, there are new risks and new challenges but the amendments add clarity. They create a sense of urgency and a mandate for companies to have good information management practices in their organizations. Forquer and Vedder Price s Carroll participated in a podcast (http://www.opentext.com/news/podcasts.html
) recently where they discussed in depth the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and their impact.
The latest software technology can give organizations the ability to both manage discovery in-house as litigation arises and to put in place a program of long-term, proactive management of content anything from informal email to formal contracts that may be subject to discovery. The technology helps organizations provide a consistent process for determining what content to keep and what to discard based on regulations and predetermined policies.
How can companies leverage this technology, sharpen their ability to manage information, and better respond to discovery requests? According to Forquer, these five key strategies can make all the difference:
- Define defensible policies: Map the governing regulations and internal requirements to the process of identifying what email or document constitutes a record. What is and isn t a record? How long should a record be kept or how long must it be kept? Does it need to be stored on a specific media? Kept in a specific location? Do your policies take into account metadata associated with records?
- Enforce policies with records management: Move policies from theory to practice with a completely automated and secure process for identifying, retaining, and destroying records. Key considerations: When does a document become a record? How do you capture the right amount of content? How do you accommodate multiple regulations or court cases concurrently? Do users need to continue to work with records or can they be offloaded into an isolated system?
- Centrally control all enterprise content: Establish control over all enterprise content without changing the way users work with content including emails and documents in Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint. Consider the following issues: How do you make records management a seamless part of the way users work? Can you describe all enterprise content in the same terms, no matter where it lives? How do you ensure that a legal hold or discovery procedure is spanning all relevant corporate content? Can you easily extend today's policies to tomorrow's potential information systems and repositories?
- Retain business records: Manage the cost-effective, physical storage of records in a compliant fashion while destroying non-records appropriately. Key considerations: How do you ensure that records are archived in a compliant manner? Does your accounting firm mandate specific storage methodologies for your records? Can you ensure admissibility by proving content has not been tampered with? Do you have a plan for storage systems that can store records for decades, outliving their host media?
- Extend with litigation support: Accelerate the collection, preservation, review and coding, and production of corporate records as evidence. Are your enterprise content repositories and records management practices fully integrated with your process for retrieving, coding, reviewing, and processing responsive content? Can you export content into the litigation support application without creating duplicate copies of records? When a case concludes, can you assuredly disable any holds placed on responsive content and automatically resume retention and disposition lifecycles?
For a white paper on litigation readiness and for more information on Open Text's litigation management solutions go to: www.opentext.com/2/pro-ll-litigation-management.
About Open Text
Open Text is the world's largest independent provider of Enterprise Content Management software. The company's solutions manage information for all types of business, compliance and industry requirements in the world's largest companies, government agencies and professional service firms. Open Text supports approximately 46,000 customers and millions of users in 114 countries and 12 languages. For more information about Open Text, visit www.opentext.com.
Safe Harbor Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995
This news release may contain forward-looking statements relating to the success of any of the Company s strategic initiatives, the Company s growth and profitability prospects, the benefits of the Company s products to be realized by customers, the Company s position in the market and future opportunities therein, the deployment of Livelink and our other products by customers, and future performance of Open Text Corporation. Forward-looking statements may also include, without limitation, any statement relating to future events, conditions or circumstances. Forward-looking statements in this release are not promises or guarantees and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. The risks and uncertainties that may affect forward-looking statements include, among others, the failure to develop new products, risks involved in fluctuations in currency exchange rates, delays in purchasing decisions of customers, the completion and integration of acquisitions, the possibility of technical, logistical or planning issues in connection with deployments, the continuous commitment of the Company's customers, demand for the Company's products and other risks detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including the Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2006. You should not place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements, which are based on management's beliefs and opinions at the time the statements are made, and the Company does not undertake any obligations to update forward-looking statements should circumstances or management's beliefs or opinions change.
Copyright © 2007 by Open Text Corporation. LIVELINK ECM and OPEN TEXT are trademarks or registered trademarks of Open Text Corporation in the United States of America, Canada, the European Union and/or other countries. This list of trademarks is not exhaustive. Other trademarks, registered trademarks, product names, company names, brands and service names mentioned herein are property of Open Text Corporation or other respective owners.
For more information, please contact
Richard Maganini
Open Text Corporation
1-847-961-0662
rmaganin@opentext.com
Brian Edwards
McKenzie Worldwide
+1-503-577-4583
briane@mckenzieworldwide.com
Michele Stevenson
Open Text Corporation
519-888-7111 ext. 2594
mstevens@opentext.com
