Over the past few years, as the volume of Electronically Stored Information (ESI) being created by has grown exponentially, organizations have struggled with decisions around the risks of getting rid of ESI and the costs and risks of keeping everything. The recent changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the United States have helped to galvanize companies' thinking around retention policies for ESI. With the cost of eDiscovery being proportional to the amount of ESI in the organization, something has to be done to stem the affects of the compound annual growth of over 60% expected for unstructured content in the enterprise!

Luckily, in the same FRCP amendments, there also lies an answer. The newly amended Rule 37(f) provides that sanctions will not be imposed if a party does not retain ESI as a result of routine, good-faith operation of an electronic information system. However, in order for a party to establish that the deletion of ESI resulted from the routine and good faith operation of their system, the party must be able to demonstrate the existence of an established, well-documented and systemized electronic records management process.

This has caused forward-looking organizations to examine their records management and content management policies and capabilities to determine if they can be used to defensibly reduce the cost and risk associated with eDiscovery. They have determined that end-users will have greater responsibility for correctly identifying and dealing with records in their earliest stages of creation. In order to not create a drag on productivity, companies are looking to solutions that allow for the transparent application of records management classification on content as part of the way that end-users already work. Additionally, with a myriad of content creating applications available, companies look for integrations to a common library where content can be stored, classified, searched and disposed of in a consistent manner.

While application of good records management policies will significantly reduce the cost of eDiscovery in the long term, many companies are burdened with the high cost of eDiscovery now and are likely to see increases in the coming years. Reducing the cost of eDiscovery is a top priority in the current economic environment.

As announced yesterday, our strategy is to help companies cut costs and risk of eDiscovery by allowing them to create defensible, repeatable processes for responding to eDiscovery requests and in the process:

• Reduce the involvement of IT in the collections process
• Reduce the volume of ESI collected by searching for the content "in place" to cull on collect
• Manage the single greatest source of risk in eDiscovery, application of a legal hold on content
• Manage the single greatest cost in eDiscovery - review - by significantly reducing the volume of content and by pre-tagging and categorizing content prior to sending the content to Outside Counsel
• Significantly reduce processing costs by processing content internally and eliminating 3rd party processing