On November 24, 2008, Christine Taylor wrote:
"In the court case Consolidated Aluminum v. Alco, the defendant suffered monetary sanctions for failing to properly apply litigation holds. In spite of the fact that Alco had a litigation hold policy in place, someone was asleep at the wheel. There were several serious issues: Alco issued the holds after litigation had begun, did not make the holds broad enough, and did not enforce holds when key employees deleted relevant data."

Ask yourself: "If faced with any type of legal action that required a litigation hold would I be able to react quickly and ensure all my data was secured?"

The new "ambulance chaser" is assuming that the answer to both of those questions is no. This new MO by litigation-focused law firms is becoming more and more prevalent.

Think about it. You are a reasonably sized company. You think you have a proactive plan for all of this, but your legal has been quite fuzzy about what data needs to be archived for both legal and compliance requirements. An action hits. A reasonable amount of time goes on. Then WHAM, the actionable law firm comes back to your company and you do not have all the data required nor do you have a clear defensible position as a result.

Why? There could be a few reasons. Your archiving requirements fell short of your litigation hold needs. Your legal advisers were more concerned about their lack of knowledge of e communications then the overall corporate picture. Your litigation hold process was not properly defined.

Here are the problems organizations face in fighting these attorneys.
-legal advisors have directed these organizations to archive only specific data because of their fear of potential legal exposure.
-struggling with what specific information needs to be archived.
-a failure to create a granular litigation hold response plan.
-unable to identify what current archived data needs to be applied to each litigation hold.

Are you ready?
Have you thought outside of the box, beyond the paper trail and really looked at the electronic trail?

Have you planned an archiving strategy beyond email, word doc's and spreadsheets?

Have you thought about all the other information being archived by your users on their laptops, their smartphones and their flask keys?

Did you consider everyone's text messages and phone call usage?

Did you ever think about all the information your employee's are currently archiving outside of the office by sending data to their home email accounts and their "gmail" account?