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Federal Rules of Civil Procedure

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The Challenge:
Complying with the Newly Amended FRCP and Avoiding the High cost of Metadata Risk.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) were recently amended to provide rules and structure to electronic discovery (eDiscovery) during the litigation process. Effective December 1, 2006, the new rules require organizations to adapt how they manage, retain, store and deliver electronically stored information (ESI) during legal proceedings. As a result, all organizations (including Global 2000) that could potentially be under investigation in the U.S. court systems must understand and comply with the new FRCP immediately. Compliance and IT departments must ensure their corporate policies and procedures for document and email retention, eDiscovery readiness, and metadata management comply with FRCP to avoid the following:

  • Business loss
  • Monetary fines
  • Negative case rulings

The Solution:
Prevent Risk of Damaging Metadata Through Proactive Metadata Management

A recent survey found that large U.S. companies concurrently manage on average 556 cases, with an average of 50 new disputes emerging each year for close to half of them (1). Moreover, due to the newly amended FRCP requesting ESI in its “native format” metadata is now particularly important. 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 a hardcopy or graphic, can be the smoking gun to make or break cases. Without proactive metadata management organizations are subject to business risk and court sanctions. In summary organizations must address the following four key components (Table 1):

1. Mandatory disclosure of all ESI under Rule 26(a)(1)(B)
2. What will not be produced, or produced only if the requesting party bears some or all of the cost of production, under Rule 26(b)(2)(B)
3. The form of production under Rule 34(b)
4. “Safe Harbor Rule” that prevents organizations for being penalized for not producing ESI if it is lost as a result of routine, good faith operation under rule 37(f)

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

Learn more about Protect for FRCP ESI Compliance

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