Plenty of folks have asked me, when I say I do eDiscovery, “Oh, so you do records management?” The answer is not really. Records and Information Management (“RIM”) and Information Governance (“IG”) share a Venn diagram with eDiscovery, but there are large areas where the two exist independently and require different knowledge and skill sets. I’m happy to help as much as I can, but RIM isn’t the same as eDiscovery or litigation readiness. I can offer value on some specific issues because a corporate litigant’s information management culture impacts litigation and the eDiscovery experience feeds back into information governance.

EDiscovery specialists often back into RIM and information governance over time because eDiscovery challenges can be the fire that forces a company to rebuild its information governance house. The cost and complexity of commercial litigation with high volume data requires litigators to think about how their clients manage their data. After the crisis has passed, litigators can offer value from lessons learned in litigation when an organization is revamping or developing an IG plan. This year’s Georgetown Advanced eDiscovery Institute included several panels discussing Big Data and Information Governance. In the last few years the panelists have moved from passively describing Big Data “There’s a lot of it! It’s bigger than Mt. Everest! There’s more every day than there was in the history of time until 1992!” to talking about its value and organizational function. This year there were robust discussions about whether Big Data changes how we think of and use technology assisted review and whether the concept of “defensible deletion” is dead.

The panelists also offered some nice new buzzwords and phrases including “ROT” = Redundant, Obsolete and/or Trivial data and “Baked-in Information Governance” (IG that requires less effort on-the-fly). Incidentally, “Information Governance” is not just “RIM on steroids,” according to this year’s Institute faculty. RIM is more centered around the mechanics of content management and IG is more multidisciplinary policy making at an enterprise level. Also, who ones IG stakeholders are varies between organizations, although generally they include some combination of Legal, IT, Risk, Security, Records and Privacy and may include HR and the business lines.

The other buzz phrase in the information governance discussion was the “black swan”, the unanticipated, high impact (often catastrophic) event. Litigation and scandal (which then results in regulatory inquiry or litigation) are prototypical black swans. Some include data breaches as an example, although at this point I don’t believe they qualify as black swans because they can no longer be described as “unexpected”. The theme that emerged was “don’t waste your black swans.” Most people don’t react to information governance challenges with urgency: the sky isn’t falling until my sky is falling. So when your sky falls, or a black swan falls out of your sky, learn from it. Develop your culture of information governance in a way that allows you to reduce the cost and disruption of future crises by making data more accessible and better organized or your process more transparent. Learn to mine your data. Understand all the types of data your organization creates and maintains. Think through why you have certain data types and how best to use or dispose of all the data types. These are long term, iterative discussions, but overall they result in a healthy organization (with less ROT).