Supply Chain Meets Content Management (Comin’ Thru the Rye)

e-Discovery and Compliance Move One Toward the Other

Sitting in on a recent update of the rules governing e-discovery, I was struck by how similar supply chain and content management best practices are coming to be … of particular interest was Rule 26(b)(1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which says, in part:

Parties may obtain discovery regarding any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense — including the existence, description, nature, custody, condition, and location of any documents or other tangible things and the identity and location of persons who know of any discoverable matter.

What this says to me (and remember, I’m not an attorney, so don’t try this at home) is that organizations involved in litigation – or wanting to protect themselves from it – must be able to identify not only which documents are relevant to the case, but any or all individuals who may have knowledge of the key information. Compliance officers, too, crave this ability, so they can demonstrate, for instance, that proper notice and access procedures are being followed.

As a practical matter, this means a whole lot of data must be collected about when the content was produced, what process it’s a part of, where it went (in what order), who viewed and/or acted upon it, and who else logically would know of its existence. This is a tall task, but it’s also not a new one, as supply chain managers have been doing this for years to keep their warehouses and manufacturing floors humming right along.

Bar coding is one ready answer in the supply chain context, and the technology is finding increasing traction as a document tracking tool as well. But more often than not, this tracking is being done at the document level, which means specific bits of content contained within those documents tend to go untagged and thus are easily overlooked – at least until a judge or opposing counsel orders a deep-dive into the details, by which time it may be too late.

What all this suggests is a critical need to manage and track content at a granular level, and to ensure process timelines and user access logs are maintained so questions about “who knew what, when” can be answered. In this, the model is not dissimilar to the tracking of packages as they move around the country. We’ve long had the ability to find out when a box was picked up, which truck it was put on, who the driver was, and who signed for the delivery. Now the trick is to accelerate the application of the same tools and techniques to content, and it will be interesting to see how this is best accomplished.

– Steve Weissman