All organizations that could potentially be under investigation in
a civil suit must understand and comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). This includes Global 2000 organizations that are not headquartered in the United States, but still may find themselves involved in a United States civil suit.
Some of the recent changes must be acted upon immediately upon litigation, thus companies must act now to protect their organization.
What do the FRCP Rules Impact?
- Email retention and archiving
- Document retention and archiving
- Metadata management
FRCP & Metadata Management
Metadata provides important information about an electronic file, such as creation date, author, and change/edit history. By implementing a Metadata management process organizations can protect themselves from damaging metadata eDiscovery. The knowledge gained from close inspection of ESI’s metadata, which is unavailable when ESI is produced as hardcopy or graphic, can be extremely useful and dangerous.
For example, the date when a certain document was created or edited can be the smoking gun to make or break cases. Without proactive metadata management organizations are subject to business risk and court sanctions.
A defined, defensible metadata management process will also be necessary for protection under Rule 37(f), the “Safe Harbor Rule”. Rule 37(f) may offer companies protection if metadata is removed as part of “routine, good faith” process that is well defined, documented, and followed.
Workshare Protect for FRCP ESI Compliance
Workshare Protect provides organizations the ability to manage their metadata in a similar manner as email/document retention and enforce secure document formats (i.e. PDF). With Workshare Protect organizations can document and enforce metadata management policies/procedures, remove meta-data as normal business practices and find and preserve metadata for eDiscovery requests.
Benefits
- Eliminate eDiscovery disasters and sanctions resulting from risky metadata
- Reduce the risk of lost business and reputation
- Comply with the newly amended FRCP
- Reduce document review time by over 50%
- Improve metadata management consistency and efficiency across entire organization
- Secure content by removing hidden metadata before distributing
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