At a global financial services institution, lack of governance around legal holds and email archives was creating unnecessary risk and data storage costs. When a new member of the in-house legal team joined the organization, eager to refresh the legal hold process and implement a defensible disposal program, she teamed up with the head of litigation and compliance to establish a firm-wide information risk management program.

Situation

After attending one of FTI Consulting’s Advice From Counsel events, a new member of the in-house legal team sought help from FTI’s Information Governance, Privacy & Security (IGP&S) team to assess the organization’s data volumes, existing email retention practices and the business benefits and cost savings that would result from an overhaul. The assessment was shared with key stakeholders across the legal, finance and IT departments, who ultimately bought-in to the proposal for an extensive information governance project that would reduce the data footprint and set a new precedent for retention of emails, records and backup tapes going forward.

Our Role

As part of an ongoing engagement, the client has relied upon the deep expertise and guidance of the IGP&S team, which has been supported by FTI’s E-Discovery Consulting & Services and Digital Forensics & Investigations practices for select projects. FTI’s experts have provided strategic advising and program execution across concurrent data remediations, legal hold updates, e-discovery and information risk management. The program has established cross-functional collaboration between legal and IT, with FTI’s team serving as a bridge between the differing needs and challenges of each department.

Additionally, FTI is supporting integration of the information governance program with both the organization’s new data privacy initiative and a data governance effort being led by IT. The team is preparing for work to tackle remediation of unstructured data, improve privacy practices and roll-out risk management policies and awareness across the organization.

Our Impact

To date, engagement has improved cross-department collaboration, reduced risk, streamlined legal processes and delivered cost savings.

The client continues to engage FTI on information governance, e-discovery and investigations matters.

Key projects include:

Email and File Share Remediation and Retention Policy

Backup Tape Remediation

Legal Hold Refresh and E-Discovery Operations