Nashville Technology Council

Sponsored by SHI

The panelists were from Nashville, Chattanooga, Texas, and New Jersey and represented both the business, legal, and technical side of eDiscovery.  They included Jonathan D. Rose, Bradley, Arant, Boult, Cummings, LLP; Clinton Sanko, Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC; Ken Due, Symantec; and Michael Rutty, IAM Field Enablement Specialist, CommVault.  Bryan Huddelston of Microsoft moderated the panel discussion.

According to Wikipedia, “Electronic discovery (or e-discovery) refers to discovery in civil litigation which deals with information in electronic format also referred to as Electronically Stored Information (ESI). Electronic information is different from paper information because of its intangible form, volume, transience and persistence.”

We were pleasantly surprised to know there is a flow process for this kind of sophisticated process called Electronic Discovery Reference Model and also an XML extension (EDRMXML).  XML stands for Extensible Markup Language to refresh your memory.  This allows the user to add code to documents to enhance standardized search, storage, and processing of documents.  In large corporations, this could help save millions of dollars in costly legal proceedings each year.  Ken Due from Symantec pointed to a study of $10 per click to review email as an average cost.

The industry of eDiscovery changed dramatically with new Federal Rules in 2006.  In essence it made C-Suite executives stakeholders in the legal process for document presentment.

The panelist received a few laughs and snickers with comments about how IT and Legal don’t always work together well.  The best quote of the night was from Clinton who described an image of a dog barking at night.  His wife reminded him that he should think “I need help” every time he hears the dog bark, not an annoying dog barking for no reason.

So from an ROI building perspective, when legal comes looking for documents, don’t think of them as just an annoying dog barking, but as an opportunity to help them and yourselves.  Like Disaster Recovery of this past decade, eDiscovery is an expensive process and not required on a day-to-day basis.  But when you need it, you need it now.  It is an opportunity for IT to align further with your company’s business objectives and create systems and process for document procurement for future law suit evidence.

So when the next law suit from a customer or an employee comes along, you have three options:
1. Pay
2. Fight
3. Wait it out.

In the meantime, why not proactively reach out to your in-house counsel and see if you can work more effectively together in crafting a strategy for eDiscovery.

While E-Discovery is focused predominantly on discovery from a legal standpoint, many organizations today are putting these processes in place to track HIPAA compliancy, email trails for HR purposes, and other compliancy proactive measures.  We hope to cover all of these areas and the traditional legal discovery as well.

The Hutton Hotel | 1808 West End Avenue | Nashville, TN
February 18, 2010
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Admission price includes a variety of appetizers and one cocktail.

sponsored by:

Registration is now closed.  You may register at the event.

Panel Members:

Clinton Sanko
Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC

Clinton P. Sanko, shareholder in the Chattanooga office, concentrates his practice in the area of commercial litigation. His experience includes general civil litigation in a variety of complex commercial matters including products liability, construction litigation, contracts, sales and reinsurance.

Ken Due
Symantec

A Texas native, Ken Due has over twenty years of experience in the IT field in a variety of roles, spending the last five years as an archiving and electronic discovery specialist. Ken joined Symantec in 2007 with a focus on assisting large enterprises meet IT, regulatory, and legal discovery requirements.

Jonathan D. Rose
Bradley, Arant, Boult, Cummings, LLP

Jon, a partner in the firm’s Nashville office, concentrates his practice in the area of intellectual property litigation and other complex federal court litigation. In recent years, Jon has seen high volume, tight timeframe, labor and technology-intensive electronic discovery scenarios become common in complex cases. Even in less complex cases, Jon rarely encounters a case in today’s world that does not require significant attention to electronic discovery issues.

Michael Rutty
IAM Field Enablement Specialist, CommVault

Since 1988, Michael Rutty has worked in the New York City area as a Systems Administrator and IT Engineer for such firms as Merrill Lynch, Prudential Investments, AT&T, IBM, Becton Dickinson and Bear Stearns. In 1999 he co-founded ASP startup, GlobalDesktop.com and later sold the company in 2001, to Canadian firm, FutureLink (BB:FTRL) after going public. In 2002 he joined email archiving firm, KVS as Lead Sales Engineer, and KVS was subsequently acquired by Veritas Corporation in 2004. Michael was lead evangelist for archiving, ILM and e-Discovery when Veritas merged with Symantec in 2005. He remained in that role through early 2007 when he joined data and information management leader, CommVault as a Field Enablement Specialist for their Archiving Center of Excellence. In the e-Discovery arena, Michael is a member of the EDRM and Sedona Conference. He is also a featured keynote speaker at IT and Legal Symposiums over North America. Michael graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in Communications, has a Graduate Law Degree from the Philadelphia Institute and attended University of Penn, Wharton School of Business.