eDiscovery Performance Still a Worry

By Greg McNevin

September 10, 2008: A new survey of legal professionals and senior managers in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands has uncovered a marked sense of concern among those tasked with mitigating organisational risk when it comes to retrieving documentation.

Conducted by Dynamic Markets, the CommVault study canvassed 300 in-house legal professionals and senior managers across three countries about the legal and financial risks associated with not being able to retrieve documentation, as well as its impact on their organisations.

Titled “Corporate Hide and Seek”, the study found that one in two organisations (47 percent) have suffered serious consequences as a result of IT systems failing to deliver critical data needed to support legal disputes when needed.

These consequences include the payment of penalties, loss of the legal dispute, or the delay or failure to produce the required information, and 39 percent of those surveyed believe they are still at risk of receiving financial penalties for not being able to produce documents by legally imposed deadlines.

Of those who believe they are still at risk, 58 percent have experienced delays in producing information and nearly half (47 percent) have failed to produce such critical information.

The survey also found that despite 80 percent of organisations claiming to have made an investment in IT to address discovery challenges, 60 percent of respondents think their IT department is not always able to deliver information quickly enough for them to do their legal job efficiently.

“eDiscovery and compliance demands continue to be of critical concern to many European organisations,” said Steven Rose, CommVault’s executive vice president of EMEA. “After highly publicised scandals, such as Enron, we expected the research to show that businesses had adopted far more rigorous approaches to identifying and retrieving electronically stored information across backup and archived data aimed at improving litigation readiness and reducing organizational risk.

“What is surprising is most organisations interviewed had suffered serious consequences because they were unable to retrieve and recover specific data, yet the significant majority felt they had adequate technology in place to produce critical information on demand. This is obviously not the case.”

Comment on this story