An Information Governance Journey: From Reactive Responses to Transformational, Proactive Initiatives.

More than 1.5 billion emails. Terabytes of data scattered among dozens of disparate vendors and outside providers. Thousands of custodians on legal hold. Numerous major legal matters at any given time and millions of dollars in annual e-discovery costs. After decades of an unsustainable but pervasive “save everything” data retention model, a large global healthcare corporation recognized the increasing risk and excessive costs of its existing approach.

For more than five years, and still ongoing today, FTI has served as a “Chief IG Advisor.” FTI’s experts have provided program management across concurrent data migrations, disposals, legal hold process updates, e-discovery engagements, file share remediations and more. The team has consistently helped the client overcome barriers relating to corporate culture, regulatory compliance and limited internal resources.

Key projects include:

  • Archive Migration: 1.5 billion emails to a new, future-proofed platform.
  • Records Classification and Retention Program: Disposal of hundreds of millions of legacy emails and automate future, ongoing defensible deletion.
  • Tape Remediation: 200,000 backup tapes, resulting in more than $500,000 estimated annual storage savings.
  • Legal Spend Analysis: A detailed analysis into billing reports, rates charged by outside vendors and other legal spend.
  • Legal Hold Playbook: Creation of a new legal hold playbook.
  • E-Discovery and Legal Hold Redesign: Remediation of outdated legal holds and integration of new preservation and collection practices.
  • E-Discovery Process Standardization: Standardized processes across all phases of e-discovery.
  • PST and File Share Remediation: Minimization effort for 130 terabytes of unstructured data across company file shares.
  • Privacy Compliance Enablement: Global implementation of multipronged privacy programs.
  • Extensive Remediation of Sensitive Information and Devices for Divestitures and Closures
  • Teammate Alias Database: To enable thorough legal hold and e-discovery search across every email address— active and inactive—assigned to employees over the life of the company.
  • Legal Expense Benchmarking: Aggregated metrics and reporting to measure e‑discovery spend and inform decommissioning of unnecessary providers and line items.

Impact

To date, project has resulted in the remediation of millions of emails and files and dramatically improved legal processes at a significant long-term cost savings.

Key benefits achieved to-date include:

  • An estimated $10 million in savings from extensive records classification and disposal project.
  • Reduction of legacy backup tapes from 200,000 to 30,000, at an estimated savings of $500,000 in annual storage costs.
  • Narrowed a large pool of disparate legal providers, reducing spend on outside providers by an estimated $6 million.
  • Significant cost savings—direct savings of $1.2 million for one matter—and e-discovery efficiencies due to a repeatable, trackable, scalable and measurable e-discovery program.
  • Major overhaul of legal hold practices and remediation of terabytes of data across countless repositories to reduce corporate risk and the time, cost and complexity of e-discovery.
  • Projected $20,000 in immediate savings from new approach to e-discovery reporting and benchmarking.