Over the past few years, businesses have been forced to confront a dramatic surge in litigation, tightening regulations, and increasing compliance scrutiny. As a result, they are facing unprecedented legal risks and costs. This unfriendly legal environment is also clashing with another inexorable trend: the accelerating growth of information. To respond to these threats, IT organizations are working to centralize information and streamline eDiscovery processes at the time of litigation.
Despite these efforts to mitigate the costs and risks of litigation, companies are often left exposed by documents stored in what many IT organizations refer to as the “Wild West” : users’ hard drives, email, removable flash drives, and network drives—all places that fall outside the realm of centralized document management systems. Today, over 7.5 billion Microsoft Office documents are created each year. Over a third of these documents contain legally sensitive information. And with more than 80% of them scattered in the “Wild West,” IT departments are left with no visibility, no control, and no way to take appropriate action.
This “document chaos” has proven to be costly. DuPont, in a well known case study, spent nearly $12M reviewing documents in a Discovery, only to find that according to existing published policy, those documents should have been destroyed in the routine course of business. An average company with revenues over $1B is engaged in 147 litigations at any given time. This creates a windfall of opportunity for opposing counsel, who often find key smoking gun documents stored on users’ hard drives or saved to long-forgotten shares.
For many companies, these serious risks and disappointing results continue even after they have invested years of effort and millions of dollars in document management and records management systems, because these systems simply cannot account for “Wild West” documents. As a result, few users bother to use these expensive centralized systems, and they remain sparsely populated with fewer than 5% of all enterprise documents. Businesses clearly need to find a different approach to this important problem.
