Should Firms Have To Order Their Records?

What’s the Latest Development?

The Australian Law Reform Commission has said it would support moves to encourage—but not force—companies to adopt document management systems to help ease the legal discovery process. The Association of Legal Support Managers had proposed forcing corporate litigants to adopt “appropriate” record management systems, saying that the root cause of discovery problems is how many litigants keep their records.

What’s the Big Idea?

These days litigants can face a nightmare in the legal discovery process—terabytes of records scattered over a number of computers without a system to retrieve them that they first have to organize before being able to start the review process. The resulting cost can be disproportionate to what the could gain from the litigation. In the digital age, should it be a given that companies adhere to certain standards of information management?