Supreme Court eDiscovery Ruling Impacts Data Management Strategies for Businesses

In December of 2006, critical changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) were turned into law when the Supreme Court ruled that electronically stored information (ESI) must be made available to litigants in civil court proceedings.

At that moment, the landscape for future litigation/arbitration and the manner in which businesses of all sizes should handle data archives changed significantly.

The amendments to the FRCP, which are often collectively referred to as the “eDiscovery Ruling,” establish best-practices and processes related to ESI and point to the significance of ESI in the discovery process of civil proceedings. The eDiscovery Ruling goes on to identify various ways that information and archived data must be made available to counsel during discovery periods, and emphasizes how technologies can play a critical role in determining adherence to the rulings or legal liability.

In general, these requirements suggest that companies should do the following:

• Maintain an electronic inventory system to identify what and where electronic documents are stored
• Document your process/procedure for storage of electronic documents
• Keep an archive of electronic data for a reasonable amount of time in anticipation of potential litigation.

Broad Impact Across Industry Sectors
The eDiscovery Ruling has impact across all business sectors; however, it is particularly important for industries like ARM that are prone to litigation, consumer watch-dog groups, and regulatory scrutiny.

Many companies do not yet understand the ramifications. According to a recent survey¹, more than half of CIOs and information technology (IT) managers do not even realize they and their company could now be found guilty of “virtual shredding,” just as a by-product of the way they back-up or store information.

An IT team member can no longer simply re-use or record-over archived data on a regular basis. Instead, a formally-identified regimen of business rules, processes, workflow, and document management is now suggested for all companies. Information (documents, e-mails, IMs communications, etc.) now must be archived for a reasonable period of time and accessible to counsels on both sides of the table during discovery stages of litigation.