The volume and complexity of ESI presents enormous challenges for corporate legal departments and the IT and compliance functions that support them, especially considering additional constraints imposed by the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The volume of e-mail and e-mail attachments alone—favorite targets of eDiscovery requests—is staggering.
Large organizations routinely generate millions of e-mails per day. As a result, there is tremendous pressure to identify, collect, and review huge amounts of ESI and still produce it under tight timelines. In addition, corporations walk a fine line between the obligation to produce all relevant data while meeting production and response deadlines on the one hand, and, on the other, securing personal and highly sensitive information, which may be privileged or otherwise protected.
For example, privacy legislation such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act requires corporate and government institutions to prevent unauthorized access to non-public personalinformation such as:
- A consumer’s name, address, social security number and account number
- Information a consumer provides on an application
- The fact that an individual is a customer of a particular financial institution
Likewise, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’s (HIPAA) Privacy
Rule establishes regulations for the use and disclosure of protected health information
(PHI), This protection extends to written, oral, faxed and electronically stored information. In addition, a specific security rule deals with electronic protected health information (ePHI), which is any PHI that is created, stored, transmitted or received electronically. The act’s security requirements are a minimum standard and place high responsibility on covered entities to take all reasonable precautions necessary to prevent PHI from being used for nonhealth purposes.
The increased regulatory demands imply that more time and caution need to be taken during the review process, but production deadlines have not been adjusted. Resulting time pressures increase the risk of producing far more than is prudent and giving away privileged documents—even the proverbial “smoking gun.” You can resort to ediscovery solution or ediscovery companies to learn more.
