Join the records management assistance unit in celebrating E-Discovery Day on Friday, December 3, 2021! Put on your records management hat, pull on your information governance boots, and get in the spirit of the day by checking out these e-discovery resources.

What is E-Discovery?

ARMA International defines e-discovery as “the process of identifying, locating, securing, reviewing, and protecting electronic information and materials that are potentially relevant to specific litigation and may need to be produced to other parties.”

There are many ways to conduct discovery, but in the context of records and information management, practitioners are concerned mostly with requests for production of documents and/or data.

The challenge: how do legal, information technology, and records management professionals ensure that all responsive information is discoverable and retrievable across all electronic storage systems used by an organization? Keep in mind, discovery applies to all organizational information, not just those documents that are considered state records.

Think about all the different electronic recordkeeping systems and formats your organization uses; email on government devices, work email on personal devices, share drives, instant messages, content management systems, offline hard drives and backup tapes, portable storage devices like thumb drives, cloud storage, legacy systems, transaction processing systems, etc. Are you prepared to search all of them? Do all your electronic files have metadata that makes them searchable? Can you identify and weed out duplicates?

Once you find the responsive documents, can you easily apply legal holds and redact information as needed?

Take some time on E-Discovery Day to reflect on the challenges of e-discovery, as well as the many ways you can prepare your organization for these types of requests.

Educational Resources

Learn more about e-discovery best practices from subject-matter experts with these free resources.

• Official E-Discovery Day Website: Discover reports, guides, case studies, and webinars. Please note: these are external resources from non-affiliated third parties.
• Peer-Reviewed Research Paper (PDF): John C. Montaña, “Information Management and the Courts – An Update,” ARMA International Educational Foundation, October 1, 2018.
• DIR’s Texas Data Management Framework: Fast Start Learning Guide (PDF): This guide provides a basic introduction to data management and data mapping.
• Microsoft’s “Plan Your Content” Guide: This documentation contains an overview of the steps you can take to improve the findability of your data. It is written for Microsoft products, but the guidance is broad enough to be useful for a wide range of software.