Survey Sez: Trouble (& Opportunity) Ahead

As mentioned below, during our visit with the Kroll Ontrack folks, they shared with us the results of their 2008 international survey of in-house counsel re: practices for managing ESI in lit and internal investigations.

The findings are very consistent with the warnings of EDD Update authors, especially Michael Arkfeld -- who has been hollering to lawyers that they really need to pay attention to all of this, or be prepared to pay a hefty price, literally and figuratively.

Key findings include:

* Only 25% of U.S. in-house counsel -- and 17% of U.K. in-house counsel -- say they are full current with ESI case law, developments and regs.
* About half of respondents in both countries have no ESI policy.

* There is confusion over who bears responsibility for ESI sanctions. About 35% of U.S. respondents say they don't know; about 20% would blame the CEO/board, roughly 20%  "own" it, and about 10% would dump it at the door of  the IT dept/CIO.
* Most respondents really don't understand the potential financial impact of poor ESI procedures.
* But 3/4s of respondents say they are losing time over lousy ESI procedures.
* Unmanageable volume heads th list of anticipated challenges over the next five years, followed by budget concerns, lack of training, tech,and/or innovation.

You can download the 2008 report Download 2008_esi_trends_report.pdf and here's last year's report Download 2007_esi_survey_results.doc as well.