E-Discovery: The stormy nature of the cloud

http://ow.ly/8lTgl

An article by David Meadows posted on insidecounsel.com website.

This article discusses cloud technology and how it will impact corporate law departments, and eDiscovery obligations.

The article states, "Companies of all sizes—public and private—seeking to reduce storage costs and improve overall efficiency and integration with partners are increasingly turning to the cloud to house information and run essential business functions remotely.

Accordingly for legal professionals, these questions loom:

• How have SaaS-based platforms historically impacted the legal market, specifically e-discovery practices?
• How will cloud-based applications impact corporate legal departments and their outside counsel in the future?"

The article further states, "With the movement of email, user files and workgroup data to cloud computing, new challenges for e-discovery have emerged. The sheer volume of data and the expense of storing it are the primary drivers behind the move to cloud computing. These drivers are also the primary reason preserving and collecting data from the cloud remains a challenge for organizations."

The article further suggests a lists of questions the legal department should ask IT to ask regarding the establishment of cloud based services:

1. What level of control or access to the organization’s data is allowed by the cloud services provider?
2. Does the service level agreement with the cloud services provider include language regarding extraction of data for e-discovery?
3. Does the cloud services provider have documentation on their data preservation and collection processes?
4. Has testing been performed on the collection process to validate the integrity of the data and timing?
5. Does the cloud services provider keep and track appropriate chain-of-custody?
6. Is there a defensible process for preserving and collecting data from the cloud services provider?
7. What is the process for collecting data when the volume is too great to download from the cloud?
8. For international organizations, can data be hosted in select global locations to ensure compliance with local, national and international data privacy laws?