In mid-2011, Canada’s Scotia Bank set up an internal eDiscovery team of three full-time professionals to tackle litigation issues for the institution in 50 countries.
The goal: to preserve, collect, review, manage and produce any electronic evidence relevant to a court case. For Greg Thompson, vice president of enterprise security services at Scotia Bank, Canada’s third-largest institution, eDiscovery has become a top concern because of the rising litigation caseload. Failure to comply with an eDiscovery request could result in fines or other penalties.
The main reasons for establishing an internal eDiscovery team, versus outsourcing it: huge cost savings, increased control of data and a better understanding of the litigation process.
“Satisfying a court order is heavy lifting,” Thompson says. “The cost and risks of outsourcing this service with regards to the number of litigations we are dealing with has skyrocketed. If you send your data to an external party for investigations, you can expect to pay somewhere around $2,000 per day compared to internal expertise, where we spend around $800 per day.”
Scotia Bank’s choice is increasingly common among private and public sector organizations worldwide. The expansion of litigations, electronically stored information and the risk of sending data to third parties are pushing these organizations to develop their own eDiscovery capabilities.
“eDiscovery is becoming a big deal,” says David Matthews, deputy chief information security officer for the City of Seattle in the U.S., and author of a forthcoming book called “Electronically Stored Information: The Complete Guide to Management, Understanding, Acquisition, Storage, Search, and Retrieval.” “Every bit of infrastructure and activity generates electronic data, so organizations and individuals are expected to understand by law where their electronic evidence is and how it’s accessed and produced in court.”
