Global enterprises face a tremendous challenge to meet growing legal and judicial expectations for preservation and retention. The volume of data is increasing by 50% per year making legal burden greater than ever and increasing data management and discovery costs.

The Legal Department has hundreds or thousands of matters and custodians that require data to be preserved or collected, often with many Gigabytes per custodian in any single matter. A few emails to custodians and IT are neither an effective nor efficient means of managing legal duties Thousands of disparate country-specific laws governing data privacy and retention compound the issues. Often, this complexity and risk lead to "save everything" practices that exacerbate discovery and data management costs without truly reducing legal risk.

The IT Department is dealing with thousands of servers, hundreds of system changes, and continuous employee departures, with only occasional emails from legal on what data to keep. Without reliable and routine guidance on what data to manage under which protocol, IT often has no choice but to manage much more data than is needed and is unable to gain any operating efficiencies by data value. Data management costs escalate, as do discovery costs for information.

The Records Management Department must manage the conflicts between business information requirements and thousands of disparate country-specific laws governing data privacy and retention. Often this complexity and risk leads to costly over retention. Conflicts between US discovery and EU privacy and data protection rules, for example, also make it challenging to comply with these diverse obligations.

Litigation, finance and business executives often rely on inaccurate or unreliable forecasts for discovery costs that take weeks to prepare but provide a poor basis for budgeting or decision making. Finance and business staff often have little visibility to legal obligations and impending legal costs. They may be unaware of the total cost of compliance they pay as a result of "keep everything" risk mitigation and data management practices. They pay both data management and legal bills, but lack control over them.

The Atlas Suite

The Atlas Suite is the only legal information governance solution to close the loop between preservation and retention, and align Legal, IT, Finance and Lines of Business to drive down legal risk and cost.

Learn more about what the Atlas Suite can do for your department: