Shows Impact of Process and Software on Reducing Risk and Cost

CGOC, a practitioners’ forum focused on records retention and preservation practices, and Huron Consulting Group (NASDAQ: HURN), a leading provider of financial and operational consulting services, today released the results of a first-of-its-kind survey on legal holds and e-discovery practices of Global 1000 companies.

The survey entitled Benchmark Survey on Prevailing Practices for Legal Holds in Global 1000 Companies focused on corporate practices for preserving information in litigation, identifying custodians of data, communicating legal holds, interviewing custodians, and collecting potentially relevant data. The companies surveyed had annual revenue ranging from $5 billion to more than $150 billion, and were in the biotechnology, chemical, energy, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and high tech sectors. The findings highlight the changes in processes and technology within these companies and the methodologies used to issue legal holds, manage preservation, and conduct e-discovery.

“Increasingly, the vast majority of e-discovery risk can be linked to the legal holds process,” said Jim Mitchell, managing director, Huron Consulting Group. “Corporations and their law departments continue to work to mitigate risk and reduce costs while at the same time they must manage their data effectively and accurately. Difficulties in preservation continue to increase due to the diversity, ever-increasing volume, and scrutiny of data. Corporations are telling us they can’t afford not to address this process.”

Given key legal decisions in recent years and the amendment of Federal Rules of Civil Procedure for electronic discovery, companies have increasingly formalized their legal holds process and are more routinely and consistently issuing legal holds as new matters arise. This increase has led to a rapid growth in the number of open legal holds and a significant impact on corporate data management practices corresponding to the number of legal matters companies have – these holds involve substantial detail about the individuals and systems with potentially relevant information that must be tracked and actively managed, often over matter lifecycles of five or more years. A majority of companies surveyed reported an average of 980 new matters initiated each year, with approximately 5100 open matters at any given time across all industries.