The litigation process generally makes provision for one litigant to obtain access to the other’s organizational record. The worst case scenario occurs when your opponent obtains unlimited or open-ended access to your electronic records. In order to mitigate this it is a good idea to develop a policy-based architecture that clearly separates between the official corporate record and work-in-progress documents. Generally, a document becomes part of the corporate record when it has been approved by an officer of the organization as speaking in the collective or official “voice” of the organization. Other corporate records include posted financial information that has become part of the historical financial record.
A Policy Taxonomy provides an excellent means for establishing organizational boundaries that mitigate the extent and scope of electronic discovery. If financial records are a separate taxonomy category defined by a SharePoint Content Type, then it may be possible to limit discovery to that content type. Also, it is possible to use the Approval process to govern the transition of documents from one Policy Taxonomy Category to another. Legal discovery is usually focused on the official record rather than the scratch information that was used to generate the official record. The locus of authorial intent on the part of the organization centers on the formally published document.
SharePoint can then use a Report Center or Document Center to query and present only those documents that have been approved and published as part of the formal corporate record. So, ideally legal discovery could be confined to the Report Center or Document Center rather than all the ad-hoc information that are process artifacts of work in progress.
SharePoint is also an excellent tool because electronic discovery generally requires that the information be presented in its native storage format. Since SharePoint physically stores information in a non-human readable format, it may be possible to confine discovery to that information which is human –readable and its associated metadata records.
This is, by the way, one of the topics in the Taxonomy and Governance Workshop that I present.
© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved
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