Reduce Litigation Costs with Records Management

While organizations worldwide attempt to manage all of their information, they are also subject to more litigation than ever. Symantec’s “2011 Information Retention and e-Discovery Survey”, found that companies with the best records management practices in place significantly reduce their risk of court sanctions and fines. These best practices include legal holds, defined retention policies for archiving, and having a dedicated repository to store their electronic documents.

The survey, conducted by Applied Research, included the responses of legal and IT employees at 2,000 companies worldwide about how they are managing their ever-increasing amounts of electronically stored information and preparing for the possibility of an e-discovery request. The types of documents most often requested as part of the e-discovery included: electronic documents (67%), database or application data (61%), email, (58%), text messages (44%), and social media (41%).

For organizations without a records management system or defined retention policy, it took on average, 66 hours to gather the information per legal, compliance or regulatory request. For firms that employed best practices, they had a 64% faster response time with a 2.3 times higher success rate showing that companies with the best retention policies and e-discovery practices can respond much faster and with greater success. As a result, they were much less subject to court sanctions, compromised legal positions and fines:

• 78% less likely to be sanctioned by the courts

• 47% less likely to lead to a compromised legal position

• 20% less likely to be fined

• 45% less likely to disclose too much information

In conclusion, there should be no excuses when it comes to controlling your valuable corporate information when it comes to legal, compliance, or regulatory requests. After reading these results, can you afford not to implement a records management system with retention policies? If you have 3 requests a year it would equal, on average, 198 hours spent looking for information. Times 198 hours by the amount paid for a single employee to find the information (say $20 per hour) which would equal nearly $4000 which doesn’t even include legal fees. That is more than the cost of the base price of FileHold!

Organizations should think proactively about records management if they want stress-free e-discovery. FileHold can provide the ideal solution where you have a single enterprise library that stores all content throughout its lifecycle, managing capture, storage, classification, multiple versions, final publication, archiving, and disposition.  This includes all forms of electronic files and documents including drafts, non-business content, email, instant messages, and so on. FileHold can help you get your documents organized quickly and easily, set up retention policies according to best practices, and have you prepared in the event of an e-discovery.

If you’re looking to get your information under control in the event of an e-discovery request, please contact [email protected].