The recent focus on information governance (IG) in the legal industry has usually been related to prelitigation data and information management for clients. The objective of these IG efforts is to prevent the high costs of e-discovery after a litigation has started by implementing prelitigation policies to regulate a client’s data by knowing what data the client owns, where it is, who owns it and how long it should be retained. Concurrently, the law firm itself is undergoing a change in the way it handles its own and its clients’ data. The law firm records management industry has been evolving to an information governance framework. The records function within the firm has traditionally been more of a back-end function, with the idea that everything was created in paper, made into an official record, indexed and hopefully regulated by retention schedules.

“But with information governance it’s now making records management one cog in the whole wheel. We’re shifting into things like matter lifecycle management, information security, information mobility, matter mobility, especially in law firms, with the transition of attorneys from one firm to another,” said Brianne Aul, senior manager of firmwide records at Reed Smith and steering committee member of the Law Firm Information Governance Symposium. Some of the other elements that make up the IG framework, according to the symposium, are IT systems administration, information governance awareness, firm intellectual property, document preservation, retention/disposition, client information requests, and records and information management.

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