In my last blog, I mentioned we’ll be at LegalTech New York, February 4-6. Well, we’re here and CommVault is committed to exchanging ideas with the legal community and is sponsoring a track for Corporate Legal Teams in conjunction with the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA). The track examines trends and best technological practices in the areas of eDiscovery and Information Governance. We’ll aim to address the biggest challenges today's corporate counsel and other legal and IT stakeholders face. I’d like to get the conversation going here as well…what are your biggest challenges around eDiscovery? What are the hot topics you’re concerned about? How will what’s happening in the market impact your business? Here’s what we’re seeing and hearing about...

1) Big Data

Big Data plagues many stakeholders, from IT to Legal. While IT departments grapple with how to support complex Big Data environments, legal teams are tasked with making accommodations for Big Data in the already expensive eDiscovery process. How to best retain, access, discover and ultimately delete content in compliance with evolving regulations is a top of mind business concern. With data located in multiple repositories, organizations struggle to find information when they need it. Overall, users are looking to gain a broader understanding of information assets and transform that intelligence into tangible business value. Our answer to that is the Simpana ContentStore, the hardware-agnostic, secure, virtual repository where all backup and archive data is maintained, which removes those barriers. With powerful and scalable content indexing, millions of items within the ContentStore can be searched in seconds to produce relevant, accurate results.

2) Data at the Edge

The rapidly increasing volume and complexity of data creates a challenge for organizations as they try to efficiently discover information needed to address corporate litigation, internal investigations, public information and audit requests. One common pitfall organizations fall into is not capturing a comprehensive data set to search. Data that resides on laptops and desktops is often overlooked, ignored, or difficult to capture. CommVault Edge™, a part of the Simpana software platform, is a complete enterprise-class solution for rapid, efficient and transparent desktop and laptop data protection. It brings critical endpoint data into the Simpana ContentStore and enables enterprise-wide search and efficient discovery of information from a single console and virtual repository. It makes self-service access to data and searching for eDiscovery and compliance information quick and simple.

3) Early Case Assessments

With a robust and intuitive search experience that was purpose-built specifically for legal teams to self-service their own collection, legal holds and reviews, the IT department is no longer burdened. That's really important when the clock is ticking against performing Early Case Assessments or weighing the cost of discovery vs. settlement. We've proven that our software is the unique single-platform approach that can compete with disjointed and fragmented solutions in this era of market consolidation. With one product, CommVault offers truly integrated collection, legal holds, search and disposition from a broad collection of data sources, streamlining the eDiscovery process across data silos and making it more defensible against point solutions.

4) Long-Term Retention and Defensible Deletion

Many organizations hoard unstructured data for decades. Growing file shares, email, desktops/laptops, even legacy backup tapes all contain many copies of aged data that no longer has business value. According to a survey at the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Counsel, up to 69 percent of data has no value to the enterprise*. Not only is this content taking up valuable and expensive space, but it can also become a liability if not properly managed. Simpana software can greatly reduce the cost, complexity and risk of storing business or compliance data through the use of content-based retention policies. These user-defined policies can be based on criteria such as file name, type, user/group, keyword, Exchange classifications, tagging and more. Unlike legacy methods that “keep everything,” our Reference Copy feature enables enterprises to keep only data that is important to the business. This can reduce retention costs up to 70 percent, and streamline discovery to improve insight and accelerate smart decision making.

5) Need for Governance-Related Services

Creating a sound records management strategy can be overwhelming for many companies. It requires coordinating the requirements of many functional departments spanning Legal, IT and even lines of business. Companies without a robust plan typically retain data forever or retain it haphazardly and ultimately incur high legal fees or settlements as a result. CommVault^® Consulting Services created its Records Management and eDiscovery Design offering to advise clients on mapping legal retention policy requirements to their storage, backup and archive environment. The Consulting team works with client legal teams, as well as data management and application owners, to develop guidelines for data retention, including best practices for data preservation and deletion.

There you have it…some of the biggest problems eDiscovery stakeholders face today and the Simpana response. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. With ever-evolving rules and the digital landscape changing so dramatically, it’s important to stay in the know. We invite you to share with us and hope to bump into you while we’re here at LTNY to learn more about the real-world eDiscovery challenges you face every day.

*CGOC Benchmark Survey on Information Governance in the Global 1000