eDiscovery Best Practices: You May Need to Collect from Custodians Who Aren’t There

http://ow.ly/c6zBQ

An article by Doug Austin posted on the eDiscovery Daily Blog.

This article discusses suggested best practices for eDiscovery, focusing on the early phases of litigation, providing tips regarding questions to pose to custodians.

The article states, "When interviewing key employees, one of the typical questions to ask is “Do you know of any other employees that may have responsive data to this litigation?” The first several interviews with employees often identify other employees that need to be interviewed, so the interview list will often grow to locate potentially responsive electronically stored information (ESI). It’s important to broaden that question to include employees that are no longer with the organization to identify any that also may have had responsive data and try to gather as much information about each departed employee as possible, including the department in which they worked, who their immediate supervisor was and how long they worked at the company. Often, this information may need to be gathered from Human Resources."

In addition, the article provides further tips about preserving data at the outset of litigation, making the following recommendations:

• Saving the employee’s hard drive, either by keeping the drive itself or by backing it up to some other media before wiping it for re-use;
• Keeping any data in their network store (i.e., folder on the network dedicated to the employee’s files) by backing up that folder or even (in some cases) simply leaving it there for access if needed;
• Storage and/or archival of eMail from the eMail system;
• Retention of any portable media in the employee’s possession (including DVDs, portable hard drives, PDAs, cell phones, etc.).