Building a Discovery Reponse Team - Part 2
by Nancy Patton, Professional Services, Fios, Inc.
In my first post in this series last week, I discussed why a Discovery Response Team is a critical component to an effective e-discovery response. This week, let’s talk about the steps you must consider in order to assure the greatest success in building your Discovery Response Team:
- Establish a team charter. This is a formal document that should address the team’s mandate, goals and objectives. It should define the elements of the team itself, and it should specify the resources the team will require.
- Identify the Right People. your Discovery Response Team should represent an interdepartmental mix of legal and technology experts who understand both the strategic and tactical requirements for defensible e-discovery response. The identification process should start with legal and IT, and then expand (to Records Management, Compliance, etc.) as needed.
- Prepare the organization for change in the management of ESI. E-discovery is, by definition, a change initiative. As a consequence, the Discovery Response Team members are change agents and their acceptance of change must be sanctioned by the organization. This acceptance must first occur at the executive level and then filter down throughout the organization.
- Determine the team’s tasks and workflow. Establish a process and workflow that will ensure collaboration and effective communication among Discovery Response Team members, as well as with external parties involved in the e-discovery process, such as outside counsel and third-party service providers.
As with any process that demands team building, creating a Discovery Response Team can be fraught with difficulties. Launching the team can take some finesse. Consider that the core of this team will consist of representatives from departments who speak different “languages” and whose goals are not necessarily the same. For example, the legal department typically seeks to preserve broadly to ensure legal compliance, while IT actively looks at options for data destruction or reduction. These objectives don’t necessarily match when legal hold obligations are in place. Therefore, the Discovery Response Team can and must be built around the common understanding and business needs of both of these business requirements.
In order to make this happen, it’s critical to bring these departments together during the early analysis and discovery response planning phases. During this early stage, each department should designate someone (or several people) who understands ESI and the implications of a demand for production. The interests and experience of each representative will differ, but, ideally, they will quickly understand that together they have a common objective: to manage ESI for the benefit of the organization.
Next week, we’ll discuss both the strategic and tactical components of a Discovery Response Team.
Filed under Discerning e-Discovery.