by Barry Murphy.

I recently co-presented at a workshop on eDiscovery.  Before I spoke about what enterprises are doing about exploding discovery costs and the fragmented solutions landscape, a very experienced corporate general counsel spoke to the IT-heavy audience.  The theme of his presentation was "help a lawyer today."  That’s right CIOs and IT project managers – your legal team is not going to tell you how to handle eDiscovery.  You are going to be responsible for effeciently and defensibly collecting information in response to regulatory and legal requests.  In fact, legal is relying on your expertise in technologies to better manage information.

The moral of the story is that IT must take the leadership role in creating a formal, cross-functional team and process for managing eDiscovery.  Don’t fret – here’s a few cheat sheets to get you started:

A list of the vendors to consider in any solution (http://www.forrester.com/rb/vpc/catalog.jsp?catalogID=24)

And the questions to ask those vendors (http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,40824,00.html)

Be sure to let me know if you have other questions about how IT can better manage eDiscovery (bmurphy@forrester.com).