The Basics of E-Discovery: Information Governance

Defining Information Governance

The leading business analyst firm Gartner defines information governance (IG) as, “The specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to ensure appropriate behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archiving and deletion of information. It includes the processes, roles and policies, standards and metrics that ensure the effective and efficient use of information in enabling an organization to achieve its goals.”
 

That definition sure is a mouthful, but really what it boils down to is quite a bit simpler:

Information governance is the set of rules organizations use to control the creation, management, storage, and ultimately the disposition of data within the organization. It governs organizational data from paper files, phone records, and voicemails to electronic data like emails, spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations, database records, and new types of electronically stored information (ESI). 
 

Information Governance and the EDRM

Now, if your introduction to e-discovery was through the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), which we mentioned in our first post in this series on the Basics of E-Discovery, you could be forgiven for thinking that information governance is part of e-discovery. After all, it appears to be the first step in the process, on the very left of the famous EDRM diagram.

However, it isn’t. In reality, e-discovery is actually a small component of an organization’s information governance program, just a small piece; a piece about managing risk and managing how data is going to be handled within the organization or as it leaves the organization for litigation purposes.

The Value of Information Governance

With more and more companies relying on data analytics to understand the vast amounts of data they possess, effective information governance strategies and policies have become increasingly important. While Big Data and its implications for IT departments are relatively well known, it also poses serious challenges to legal departments. The sheer volume of documents that legal has to contend with in even simple investigations can be huge, to the hundreds of thousands or even millions of documents for a single matter. Figuring out which of these documents you need for that particular matter can be daunting.

Information governance is certainly a huge topic and there’s lots more to learn. But if your primary focus is e-discovery and how it intersects with IG, then Exterro’s Basics of E-Discovery Guide is a great place to start.

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