Fios Introduces IT Infrastructure Readiness Consulting Service to Address e-Discovery Requirements

New Service to Help Corporate IT Optimize Technology Infrastructure to Meet Growing e-Discovery Demands 

Pub. 7.9.08 by vendor

Fios, Inc., dedicated exclusively to delivering comprehensive electronic discovery services to corporations and their outside counsel, today announced its newest consulting service for IT departments. Fios' IT Infrastructure Readiness Consulting service is designed to help CIOs and IT leaders at litigious corporations address the technology infrastructure requirements needed to effectively and efficiently respond to e-discovery demands.

The new service provides a formal assessment and framework—and identifies the requisite people and processes—to help IT align the legal requirements for managing electronically stored information (ESI) during e-discovery with the organization's technology infrastructure.

"The challenges that corporations face when compelled to respond to e-discovery are very closely aligned with the challenges that IT addresses on a regular basis -- exploding data volumes and proliferating software applications, undefined retention policies, data security and privacy issues, data access controls and much more," said Sam Panarella, vice president and managing director of Fios Consulting. "By leveraging well-established IT infrastructure protocols and proactively working with legal to understand e-discovery requirements, IT can more effectively manage the technology infrastructure to support e-discovery demands and reduce the organization's overall risk profile and costs."

Fios' consulting team guides IT and their legal counterparts through a four-step process to determine the technology requirements for managing a corporation's e-discovery activities. This process includes:

• Needs assessment -- assessing the existing technologies, people and processes that are in place for responding to current and anticipated e-discovery demands.
• Gap analysis -- analyzing the gaps between current and anticipated needs to respond efficiently to e-discovery, as well as identification of the greatest areas of risk.
• Planning -- establishing a formal framework for evaluating current and future technology requirements and other e-discovery initiatives.
• Recommendations -- recommending specific actions for improving utilization of existing systems or acquiring new technologies, including associated people and process improvements.
  

"e-Discovery is a problem that impacts operations within both legal and IT, yet the ownership of the process is often undefined," said Panarella. "CIOs and IT leaders have a real opportunity to effect positive change that can reduce corporate risk and improve the return on existing technology investments when addressing e-discovery requirements."
He added that many of the established initiatives that are in use by IT today can be applied to the e-discovery business process. These include:

• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) -- focuses on service design, strategy, transition, operation and continual service improvement. e-Discovery is a critical business function that can leverage the ITIL framework.
• Asset management or configuration management Database (CMDB) -- a repository of information related to all the components of an information system. IT and legal can use data stored within the CMDB in creating an ESI content map for e-discovery.
• Application rationalization -- focuses on system performance, efficiency, modernization, positioning for growth and reduction in costs. A successful application rationalization program can include a legal metric to minimize the complexity and variability of the data types and content repositories that may be subject to discovery.
• Help desk -- a monitoring tool often used by IT for responding to internal customers. Help desk has the potential to improve management of legal holds and data collections by routing questions from data custodians and tracking acknowledgements during discovery. 

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