Tuesday, February 26, 2013

DOJ Director Talks About Investigations And E-Discovery Technology




http://ow.ly/i3vU4



An article posted on the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel website, which consists of an interview of Allison C. Stanton, Director of E-Discovery, FOIA and Records for the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice, taken by the Editor of Metropolitan Corp. Counsel.

The article quotes Ms. Stanton's response to a question about DOJ guidelines being provided to the private sector, and states "Over the last couple of years, the DOJ has done a lot of outreach to the legal and corporate communities through conferences like LegalTech, Masters Conference and others. I bring my own experiences from having worked in the private sector. We want to understand the communities’ perspectives as we develop our strategic philosophies and approaches.

A number of divisions at the Department have taken concrete steps. For example, my colleagues in the Antitrust Division have published discovery protocols for second requests, and they have a robust and strategic way of engaging companies. On the criminal side, criminal discovery protocols were established for matters post-indictment. In the general civil context, we’ve been working across the Department to develop standard approaches in certain cases for engaging with the other side. These approaches help ensure that at the beginning of a case, for example, everyone clearly understands what the company needs to preserve and collect.

It is important to recognize that informational needs vary across government agencies; what the SEC collects may be different from what the DOJ seeks. We try to be clear in the early stages – in a subpoena, for example – as to what the acceptable format for document preservation and collection is and what metadata fields and information a company must retain."

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