At a recent corporate client meeting held to determine whether an in-house legal e-discovery tool would be a good fit, the first item on the agenda was the cost. Before getting started, however, we had to stop the meeting so the IT and legal personnel charged with e-discovery compliance could introduce themselves to each other. Here it was, a meeting in 2011 about e-discovery, and the key players on both sides had never met.
This is not an atypical situation. In fact, findings from the recent benchmark study from the Compliance Governance and Oversight Council illustrate that corporate legal departments and the chief information officer’s office still have a long way to go in establishing the necessary linkage and collaboration to tackle information governance (records & information management or RIM for purposes of this article) and specifically, to be ready for e-discovery. According to the study, “50% of companies had executive committees in place, yet only 17% felt that the right stakeholders were at the table.”
