Most organizations are experiencing an explosion of electronic information, especially in the form of semi-structured (email) and unstructured electronic documents and files. Is this explosion of such content a problem for IT, Legal, Compliance, Records Management, Security, or is it really the responsibility of each of a company’s employees who are generating it? The answer of course is ‘yes’.
Discovering information for legal matters is costing companies billions of dollars per year. In addition to a general failure to harness the critical corporate asset of information, some have ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, often for unintended loss or disclosure of information that was legally required to be securely kept. Technology drives tremendous efficiencies, but if we don’t policy manage electronically stored information (and “defensibly destroy” it when it no longer has business or legal value), it can overwhelm us.
Why haven’t companies done a better job addressing this problem? A central reason is that techies and lawyers often don’t speak the same language.
Welcome to my first blog. I am both an attorney (Associate General Counsel), and a business executive for a technology company (EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company and leading provider of information management solutions). As the head of EMC's compliance solutions practice, my goal is to bridge the gap between Legal and IT, by taking my legal knowledge and experiences and applying them, in risk adjusted and practical ways, to the most acute information management compliance pain points that companies are facing.
The content of this blog, and the opinions in it, are my own, and they do not constitute legal advice.
-- Andrew Cohen
Comments