It is commonplace in this tough economy for corporations to run mean and lean. Many are not investing in the future, but are simply maintaining the status quo until the tides turn. However, corporate legal teams remain responsible for managing liability in today's challenging legal climate. New government regulations, evolving rules of procedure, and the increasing complexity and impact of technology make risk management ever more difficult.

One area of escalating risk and cost to the enterprise is unmanaged information. Whether resident on seemingly self-propagating data archives, forgotten shared drives or mounting stores of legacy backup tapes, unmanaged information not only accounts for an increasingly large percentage of a company's IT budget, it also represents an unknown and seemingly unknowable risk. How can legal teams help their clients proactively manage user data within tight budgets and ensure that corporate information management policies are implemented?

Corporate IT departments consume a large portion of the corporate budget, and they also are the teams that manage all user data. Finding money in these already strict budgets and delivering the tools to enable IT to implement policy can seem like insurmountable challenges. However, by leveraging available technologies, a large component of typical IT budgets can be freed up and used to manage long-term liability. For example, most companies spend a significant amount of money on offsite storage of legacy backup tapes. These legacy tapes are, in fact, a considerable liability as they contain years—and even decades—of unmanaged corporate data.