InsideCounsel » August 2007
Access Restriction
Digital Rights Management lets companies safeguard electronic documents during discovery.
Halliburton Co. has a lot of information it considers confidential—and it wants to keep it that way. Like many companies, the energy giant's success is dependent on keeping secrets, from financial data to IP.To ensure this information stays under lock and key, Ron Perkowski, senior counsel at Halliburton, is turning an eye toward digital rights management (DRM).
"With this technology we could put a limited number of views on an electronic document, or we could even put a tracker on there so we know who looked at it," he says.
DRM, also referred to as information rights management, is a type of software used to restrict access to and usage of information, especially copyrighted materials. The technology is more than a decade old but is just now seeing its debut for legal applications.
What propelled DRM into the legal spotlight was the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which codified that electronically stored information is discoverable. Now that companies must produce electronic documents—some of which are very sensitive—in native format to outside parties, it's more crucial than ever to find ways to track and control the use of electronic information.
"Companies are tired of being at the mercy of the end user of a document, and so they're looking to control their information through its lifecycle," says Brad Gross, chair of Becker & Poliakoff's business technology law group. "The ability to stop leaks has been the Holy Grail. DRM presents a viable and efficient way to accomplish those goals."
Protecting IP
DRM gained popularity in the early 2000s when Apple used it to stop users from duplicating copyrighted songs they bought on iTunes. Programmers quickly realized the potential advantages of applying this technology to other kinds of electronic information. Now they use DRM to protect documents, as well as the media files the technology had historically been associated with.
This is good news for in-house counsel, who dread turning over sensitive documents during discovery. Now with DRM, counsel can protect sensitive information even after the documents leave the company.
"Attorneys know they have an obligation to produce confidential documents, and knowing that they have additional methods of protection might ease some of the angst associated with producing these things," says Chris Kruse, president and CEO of CaseCentral, an e-discovery solutions provider. CaseCentral recently launched the first discovery solution that incorporates DRM technology— the CaseCentral Discovery Lifecycle Management platform with information rights management.
CaseCentral's software allows attorneys to assign security controls to documents by selecting from a list of 15 parameters. Once the user selects those parameters, the software puts the document into an encrypted envelope and sends it to CaseCentral's servers. If the lawyer decides to send that document to opposing counsel, that person's computer will establish a connection with CaseCentral's servers when that attorney opens the file. CaseCentral will then check and enforce the controls associated with that file.
