If your organization is involved in litigation, your legal team understands what information matters to a case. However, your IT team knows where that information lives and how the company systems work. When these groups operate separately, eDiscovery can be slow and expensive. For example, legal might request data without understanding the technical challenges involved, while IT may collect more information than the matter requires.
Strong collaboration between your legal and IT departments connects these areas of expertise and helps your organization collect data quickly and efficiently in compliance with eDiscovery obligations. This kind of strong collaboration can be simpler than expected when you rely on Hanzo Illuminate to preserve, collect, and analyze your data at scale.
Legal and IT teams have different responsibilities, but eDiscovery requires these groups to collaborate. Legal defines the scope of the matter, identifies relevant issues, and determines which information may require preservation. IT explains which systems contain that information and how they can preserve and collect it.
This process is not always seamless, as problems can arise when communication begins only after a legal hold or collection request. Legal may not be aware that employees have moved conversations from email to Slack or Microsoft Teams, while IT may not know why a particular chat channel or project workspace matters. Aligning legal and IT departments helps both teams identify these issues before they interfere with efficient data collection.
A current data map helps your legal and IT teams work together to collect data faster by giving them a shared picture of your organization’s information. It should identify:
Modern data maps should include more than email and traditional file servers. Employees may work across many platforms, from Google Drive to Slack. A message in one application may also link to a document stored somewhere else. Your legal team needs to know about all of it, and the IT department must help them find everything.
Keeping this map current allows legal teams to identify likely sources faster without asking IT to investigate your entire technology environment every time a new matter arises. One benefit of using Hanzo Illuminate is that it automatically maps your users, channels, and conversations across all of your collaboration sources.
Clear data collection requests from the legal team can help them work effectively with IT. Broad requests can create unnecessary work for IT and larger datasets than necessary for legal review. Instead of asking for everything associated with a particular employee, legal teams should provide as much useful information as possible.
A collection request might identify:
IT can then determine the best way to retrieve that information while maintaining its integrity.
Your organization should not have to create a completely new solution every time you get a legal hold. With repeatable procedures, both teams can understand what happens after a matter triggers preservation and collection obligations.
These workflows can define responsibilities that teams implement as soon as you receive a legal hold, and they can continue to guide all relevant teams throughout the eDiscovery process. A repeatable workflow can align the legal and IT teams, increase data collection efficiency, and reduce mistakes.
Hanzo Illuminate helps organizations create a data map showing what information exists and where it resides. It supports modern collaboration sources, including chats, shared documents, and linked content that traditional email-focused discovery processes may struggle to handle. By collecting the necessary data and making it easy to review, Illuminate aligns your IT and legal teams for faster data collection and simplifies the work of both departments.
Effective collaboration between legal and IT depends on shared visibility, clear responsibilities, and repeatable processes. Contact a Hanzo representative today to discuss how this technology can simplify eDiscovery for your organization.
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