Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50895
BUSINESS CASE to have a mechanism in place that pre- serves a file and can create a second set that a lawyer can review without worry- ing about spoiling it. He likens the situation to a bloody glove found at a crime scene. "Most soſt- ware today makes a copy of that glove or cuts it up in little pieces and puts it in little bags and sends it all over the world. What we do is we preserve the original glove, the original fingerprint, without making a separate copy. You'd hate to go to court and know you were looking at a red glove but it was a blue glove in ques- tion," he says. He says his company's Trident prod- uct can tell you who looked at a particu- lar e-mail file, who touched it, and how or whether it's been perfectly preserved. "When you go to court, you're confident nothing has been changed or altered or [has] tampered the data. If you cut your hand on the glove, it would be spoiled. We preserve that," he says. Childress says his firm expects to do about $5 million in new business this year, a drop in the bucket in an industry various surveys have pegged at a $6-bil- lion sector that's growing at 30 per cent annually. Patrick Burke, assistant general coun- sel for California-based Guidance Soſt- ware, says it's both a legal and techno- logical challenge for lawyers to search through the computers of their clients to find anything that might need to be pro- duced to the other side. The obligation to do so, however, kicks in well before one might see the inside of a courtroom. He says lawyers in the U.S. begin the process when they could "reasonably anticipate" litigation, and new legislation in Canada, due to come into effect shortly, will make the situation very similar on this side of the border. Burke says Guidance's products allow companies to search all the computers I'VE GOT 10 BUCKS BURNING A HOLE IN MY POCKET. I'M GONNA . . . SQUEEZE OUT 8.33 LITRES OF GAS - ROAD TRIP! HOW DID I GET THIS EXTRA $10, YOU ASK. BY SUBSCRIBING TO THE DIGITAL EDITION OF CANADIAN LAWYER 1 Year Print & Digital 1 Year Digital Only 2 Year Print & Digital 2 Year Digital Only $65.00 + gst $55.00 + gst $105.00 + gst $95.00 + gst Special rates for students and international subscribers. To order: call 1-888-743-3551 or go online at www.canadianlawyermag.com connected to their networks and look for particular files that have keywords or other search criteria in them — all from one central location Burke says in-house lawyers need to establish an e-discovery process, in- cluding having legal and information- technology teams work together, for the collection and preservation of electronic data. That includes determining their ca- pability to reach all the computers and servers in the company, search them, and collect data in a way that doesn't change it. "Together, they have to work out a process by which every time they have a need to collect, they follow a repeatable process, they do things in the same way every time, and they have a checklist. You want to be able to show when [the data] was actually created and collect it in a way that you can prove it wasn't changed — a forensic collection," he says. IH GET ME A JUICY RIB EYE STEAK FOR THE BBQ HEAD TO THE TRACK AND BET ON THE PONIES 42 OC T OBER 2008 C ANADIAN Lawyer INHOUSE SubAd_10bucks.indd 1 5/1/08 1:13:10 PM