Canadian Lawyer InHouse

SEPTEMBER 2015 36 INHOUSE team successful is having a good forensic team, Alleyne says. "The people we have on it really know their stuff and can deal with data and managing volume." Millar and Wilks agree that fi nding experienced e-discovery professionals can be a challenge. Millar contends people who work in his area seem to have the tech or legal aspect of e-discovery nailed down, but rarely both. "Law clerks don't have the tech and the tech people don't have the law," she says. "So fi nding an in-house resource is often diffi cult in terms of someone knowing what they're doing." A major part of knowing what you're do- ing is being able to spot where data actually resides within your company, Millar says. "I think that's probably the biggest issue that I see in in-house counsel," she says. "Like most lawyers, they're not particularly well versed in technological issues — they don't have a good understanding of the IT structures of the company or the fi rm that they're working at." Often, lawyers tend to think they've got their bases covered if they can access e-mails and hard-copy documents for the purpose of e-discovery. "They don't realize that data can be stored in all different places — a fi le server to a SharePoint system to even people with iPhones," Millar adds. Counsel also fails to appreciate how to collect information in a way that protects the integrity of the data, according to Mil- lar, who adds it's important to know what data was collected when, and making sure it's collected in a way that preserves the metadata associated with it. Things are even more complicated in companies that encourage employees to bring their own devices to work, Wilks says. In those circumstances, "I'd advise them to have a policy with respect to BYOD, but at the same time, you need to know what your limitations are," he says. "If someone comes asking for information, you might say, 'Well, we actually were aware of this device, but we know that there's no way for us to forensically capture it. We may be able to copy some information from the device, but there may not be a forensic way of doing that.'" Another issue for in-house counsel is get- ting other people in their companies engaged in the process of e-discovery, says Millar. "You've got in-house counsel doing their best, but nobody else at that client [compa- ny] really cares," she says, noting they don't always get a response from people they're reaching out to internally. Despite these challenges, a variety of tools are making it easier for legal departments to tackle e-discovery with reduced costs. Alleyne likes e-discovery software from Relativity. "Most of the hosting vendors would use that or have access to a variation of it, and it's essentially a technology-assisted review format. It helps you to tag your documents in kind of a bulk way," she says. The Relativity system makes it easier to identify duplicates, Alleyne adds. "The software works so that if someone reviewed the fi rst document and tagged it, the system recognizes the duplicates and will tag all the others so that someone doesn't have to review each independent document." But Alleyne says choosing the right Because business issues are legal issues. So if you want to get ahead in business, get the degree that gets you there faster. ONE YEAR – PART - TIME – NO THESIS FOR L AWYERS AND NON - LAWYERS law.utoronto.ca/ExecutiveLLM GPLLM Global Professional Master of Laws [Get a Master of Laws] ntitled-3 1 2015-03-02 9:02 AM

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