Canadian Lawyer InHouse

Oct/Nov 2012

Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives

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to understand the scope and limits on electronic records." 5. It takes time to map McLean says before you start talking to software vendors, you need to figure out what data you need to get at and where it is located. That takes time. "One aspect of our project involved a fairly significant amount of data map- ping to determine where the lion's share of data was located, They reviewed more than 100 software applications across the company, which included tapping into unstructured data on desktops, such as PowerPoint presentations, emails and spreadsheets. " McLean says. 6. Build a multidisciplinary team Legal departments that have internalized e-discovery have succeeded by building a team that blends legal, paralegal, proj- ect management, and technology skills. McLean says while it's important to have proper processes in place, "you need to have some people who are ded- icated to dealing with this. We decided we should hire an e-discovery manager to sit on top of the process and be in a position at any point to be dealing with legal holds, directing the collection of data and being an interface between the legal department and information service people whose assistance is nec- essary to collect the data." McLean adds when he advertised for the job of discovery manager, he received appli- cations from people with a range of skills from IT professionals to project managers and paralegals. He hired a paralegal they were purchasing. CIBC's MacFarlane adds that "I don't familiar with the software think it's a function you can delegate to someone who doesn't know the case, it's important that the lawyer handing the file remain heavily involved in the process. 7. Collect and preserve MacFarlane says that acting quickly " so to collect and preserve documents is key. "Once you preserve everything, you can take a deep breath and know everything is there. retention policies, because they can dif- fer within an organization. "Some are shorter than others," she warns. That means understanding records' " 8. Avoid the 'oops' factor Experts say that analytics is one area that is rapidly changing when it comes to e-discovery. Jim Michalowicz, a former in-house litigation manager and now a consultant with Altman Weil, Inc., says that once you identify the location of relevant information, you need to collect it from the various custodians inside the company who are in possession of the material. He suggests creating a central repository as you prepare information for production. Michalowicz explains that as com- panies move from collecting data to analyzing it the "cost per unit to touch one of the pieces of data or documents WE CAN HANDLE ANY PITCH. LITIGATIONBOUTIQUE.COM WOODS LLP LITIGATION . ARBITRATION . CLASS ACTION 2000 McGILL COLLEGE AVE. SUITE 1700 MONTREAL, QUEBEC H3A 3H3 T. 514-982-4545 26 • OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2012 Untitled-2 1 INHOUSE 6/17/11 12:21:22 PM

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