Getting a Hold on Legal Holds
Findlaw.com, October 2008 - Especially since the late-2006 e-discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, companies are grappling with the appropriate scope of legal holds and the methods to identify, retain and harvest information that reasonably may be relevant to actual or potential litigation. Appropriate to the times, CGOC and the Huron Consulting Group have just released the results of a survey on legal holds and the e-discovery practices of 1,000 global companies. While software solutions appear to help when it comes to the increasing burdens of legal holds, companies should not let the human assistance of counsel get lost in the shuffle.
The survey, which goes by the title "Benchmark Survey on Practices for Legal Holds in Global 1000 Companies," primarily centers on practices for preserving information for litigation, identifying data custodians, communicating legal holds, interviewing custodians of information, and harvesting potentially relevant data. The survey focuses on relatively large companies, as their average annual revenues range from $5 billion to in excess of $150 billion. The companies fall within the high-tech, financial services, insurance, biotechnology, chemical, energy, manufacturing and pharmaceutical sectors.