failure or success?

Information governance is far from a new concept. Most firms understand the need to invest time and resources into developing policies and procedures to manage the vast amounts of information in their possession. But anyone who has considered IG policies knows the difficulties that come with properly executing them.

Understanding the pitfalls and avoiding them, however, are two different things. Because of the historically manual processes and large volumes of information involved, the risk of falling behind on your obligations is always high—especially today when the average lawyer is handling increased caseloads while facing client pressures to be more efficient. Even when the risks of noncompliance are clear, it's still easy to fall short.

So, now that you've developed comprehensive IG policies around content life cycle management, how do you make sure the right people implement them consistently? The answer lies in automation.

Technology can make executing your IG policies infinitely easier than it would ever be to carry out the processes manually. Gone are the times of running a manual search for matters that are ready for disposition, sending a memo to the responsible parties, waiting for signoffs on destroying files and then starting the destruction process when those approvals finally surface. Today's technology can automate these processes and trigger the steps leading to review and disposition, to help guarantee compliance for both internal policy and outside counsel guidelines (OCG.)

A large part of executing any retention policy is the review structure. If you have, for example, one requiring destruction of information for cases closed for seven years, what's the best way to ensure that the policy is actually executed? For many firms, this means addressing hundreds of thousands of boxes of files, on top of several terabytes of data, all subject to the same policies.

Regardless of the type of data, the best way to implement and manage your policy is to find a tool designed specifically for compliance. The idea is to take what has long been a complex, manual project with many moving parts and put it into a logical, automated process.

Using matter close date plus x years as the trigger for review and disposition is common practice among law firms. Applying the rule against the matter and then having it trigger the disposition review is critical. In our example, any matter that has been closed over seven years will be triggered for review and ultimate destruction of data. For new matters, the process is easy. Any newly opened matter can have the policy applied to it at the time the matter is opened, which will simply wait for a closed date to be entered and kick off disposition whenever the time is right. With historical matters, the first step is setting up your policy management tool to integrate with your existing repositories, whether you have document management systems, shared drives or your records management system for physical files, to identify matters meeting the criteria.

Work flow to manage the disposition review process and executing the policy requirements will help guarantee compliance with your policies or OCG. Most policies will require each matter to have an assigned reviewer, so as part of the work flow, this reviewer can receive a notice containing the list (or a link to the list or system dashboard) of matters to be reviewed. From there, the reviewer provides approval for destruction or a reason for retention to be delayed. The simpler it is for reviewers to respond, the more likely they are to do it in a timely manner.

Automating notifications will ensure reviews are initiated and completed on a regular schedule, in accordance with your IG policy.  Modern RIG systems will automatically generate notices throughout the process, from instructing the attorneys, GC and RIG staff when to begin, to handling escalations, and warning when the review period is coming to an end. Many also provide the option to link the designated reviewer for a matter to the responsible attorney in the firm's billing records, preventing gaps that often occur from staffing changes or attorneys leaving the firm. If the responsible attorney still fails to do the necessary review, the policy can include a process for reassigning or escalating the matter to a next level of review after a certain period.

An automated system can also take into account other factors affecting the disposition schedule, like litigation holds, OCG differing from internal IG policies or clients demanding all files be returned to them after a certain time. By tracking all this information automatically, you remove the need to manually juggle competing considerations for a given matter. Keep in mind that clients are asking to review procedures and processes more and more around IG. You should be ready to provide auditable reports on execution of policies so that clients can review them if they need to.

What if you have 20 or 30 years' worth of information that's never been addressed for disposition? Obviously, executing your IG policy would be a very time-consuming manual process that could seem overwhelming. Having any automation that can ease the workload by breaking it down into manageable chunks is helpful—for example, by scheduling the handling of the previous year's files in the upcoming quarter, the prior two years' files in the following quarter and continuing on until all the necessary reviews are complete. In some cases, you might find matters sitting idle for 20 years but never officially closed. A systematic review allows you to develop a procedure for handling those, whether it's closing them or deciding to work from a last-billed date, rather than a closed date.

Automating the retention disposition process can provide a firm with a wealth of data for reporting. Destruction reporting can typically indicate how storage space was saved for physical records, and therefore how much was saved in vendor storage costs. Disposition reporting also shows how much disk space was opened by deleting electronic records. And, since most work product is kept seven years or longer, forecast reports would be virtually 100 percent accurate looking forward seven years. Imagine being able to show partners the cumulative savings from future dispositions by implementing the kind of IG clients want anyway.

Automation and reporting your policies can provide not only a much better sense of how successfully you are executing them, but also identifiable trends in the amounts of data you can expect to store going forward, allowing you to predict what your future storage needs will be. By knowing which matters will be disposed of in a given time frame and which will continue to accumulate, you'll have a better sense of your overall cost expenditures for both physical and electronic storage.

Automating your IG policy practices will achieve much more than lowering risk, cost and meeting compliance. You'll know that your handling of IG related to matters is consistent.

 

Darrell Mervau is a co-founder and president of FileTrail Inc., a global leader in records management and information governance. Having spent his entire career in the field of information management and governance, Mervau previously held executive roles with two different start-up companies and was instrumental in their early growth and successful sale.