How CIOs Can Prepare for Electronic Discovery

Interhack Director Mason Evans speaks to CIOs at the CIO Practicum held at the University of Kentucky about planning and strategies to reduce the pain and cost of responding to electronic discovery requests.

Columbus, OH—Interhack Director Mason Evans speaks at the CIO Practicum held at the University of Kentucky on May 17, 2012 about planning and strategies to reduce the pain and cost of responding to electronic discovery requests. Lawsuits are a fact of corporate life. Understanding judicial thinking can assist in dealing with and planning for litigation. 

Three key suggestions:
  • Plan for information management lifecycle. The more data that you have, the more it will cost to go through when you are involved in litigation or a government investigation. Include information disposal in your lifecycle plan in order to minimize the costs of dealing with legacy data.
  • Build a response team. Get buy-in from IT, Legal and the Business Unit. Conduct a mock fire drill. Show people—don’t just tell them—what adverse consequences can result from poorly prepared or poorly planned information management practices.
  • Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Mason is the Director of Interhack's Electronic Discovery Practice. He organizes Interhack's computer science expertise to address the electronic discovery market consistent with the Interhack experience—expert consultation and opinion, artfully delivered. Mason is a seasoned trial attorney and continues to serve as counsel to the Civil Rules Committee of the Ohio Supreme Court's Commission on the Rules of Practice and Procedure in Ohio Courts. He is also the principal author of the 2008 electronic discovery amendments to the Ohio Rules of Civil Procedure.

The CIO Practicum in Kentucky is part of the nationally acclaimed CIO Solutions Gallery program—an ongoing forum where senior IT leaders come together in a comfortable, collaborative  setting to tackle common issues.  Participants share their experiences and insights in a very interactive and lively "Amish barn raising" like format focused on real-life situations.  This provocative program is uniquely organized around CIO "peer learning" and collective joint problem-solving, and it has received extensive praise.

About Interhack

Interhack aids executives and attorneys facing challenges and opportunities involving the use of information. We perform security assessments, provide incident response programs and services to work with data in legal proceedings. Our work is used to find the right questions to ask and the best answers science can provide. Based in Columbus, Ohio, Interhack supports clients nationwide. Additional information about Interhack is available at web.interhack.com.