InsideCounsel » May 2008
Database Danger
Producing structured data poses unique challenges for in-house counsel.
The credit crisis is sending the economy into a tailspin. Meanwhile, legal professionals await the litigation fallout from the issuance of so many bad mortgages.
It is this anticipated abundance of litigation that experts believe could wake a sleeping giant, known as structured data, that might forever change the scope of e-discovery. Structured data is information that is managed and stored in an organized system, typically a database, as opposed to unstructured data, such as e-mails and Word documents.
“You are going to see a lot of litigation from shareholders and investors arising from the credit crisis, and a great deal of information in these matters is going to be from structured data sets,” says John Montana, general counsel of The Pelligroup Inc., a records management consultancy.
It’s likely that once structured data is thrown into the e-discovery limelight, it’s there to stay. As plaintiffs’ firms learn to request this kind of information, corporations better be prepared to produce it.
“Historically, the cost benefit of requesting and producing structured data wasn’t understood,” says Erik Post, senior managing director at FTI Consulting Inc., which has a team of professionals that consult on producing structured data. “Now the plaintiffs’ bar realizes a lot of information lies in these systems. In-house and outside counsel need to understand how these systems are set up and how to review them.”
Ubiquitous Info
No company is exempt from the structured data issue. Even a one-person company is subject to its difficulties if the owner uses a program such as Quickbooks to handle his accounting. That’s because structured data is any information that is stored and managed in a database.
Countless systems, both proprietary and off-the-shelf, fit this definition. For example, HR, accounting, content management, customer relations and inventory control systems all fall within the realm of structured data. In fact, according to the Data Warehousing Institute, an educational organization that caters to business and IT professionals, 47 percent of all enterprise information is structured, with 22 percent being semistructured data that exhibits both structured and unstructured qualities such as spreadsheets. However, when it comes to e-discovery, structured data is all but absent from discussion.
“I’d say 80 percent or more of discovery is devoted to e-mails and attachments, while the remaining 20 percent focuses on unstructured information stored on hard drives and servers,” says George Socha, e-discovery consultant and co-founder of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) project, the think tank that created the standard workflow chart ubiquitous among e-discovery professionals.
The legal profession has shied away from dealing with structured data in part because lawyers are still getting their arms around unstructured data. But the overriding reason why structured data has had little mention in e-discovery circles is due to one thing—fear.
Data Dismay
Structured data poses numerous difficulties that unstructured data does not.
