Practice Area
briefings
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Information Governance
By Alison Silverstein and Jared Nelson, McDermott Will & Emery LLP
What is information governance?
Data is the key that unlocks a competitive edge in every industry and
every country. Data is also an area
of tremendous potential risk and
exposure. Information governance
(IG) is the framework that makes a
corporation’s data secure, organized,
compliant, and accessible. It is the
intersection of records management,
compliance monitoring and enforcement, and leveraging of corporate
intelligence. It is the organized system
where information, knowledge, and
data is carefully identified, labelled,
and sorted into distinct and easy to
find sectors. But it is also the mechanism to create significant advantages for a wide variety of objectives,
particularly when a company is
required to analyze large amounts of
data, whether for large scale litigation,
government investigations, internal
compliance monitoring, or identifying areas for growth and innovation.
In-house counsel’s role in
information governance
IG provides a crucial safety net during a crisis and also a framework for
the increasingly expanding and vital
resource of data.
When your company is hacked,
you will have a critical period of
seconds or minutes to make key
decisions that can only be informed
and effective if you have a crystal
clear understanding of how your
data, as a key source of legal exposure, is stored and accessed through
the company’s dozens of systems
and platforms.
When you have an urgent
investigation, either internal or
government-driven, you will have
a critical period of minutes or
hours to make key decisions that
can only be informed and effective
if you have a crystal clear under-
standing of how your data, as criti-
cal evidence, is stored and accessed
through the company’s dozens of
systems and platforms.
When your company is involved
in any dispute resolution, you will
have days or weeks to implement
Litigation Hold and Preservation
requirements, followed often by
hugely expensive wide scale col-
lection, analysis, and production
requirements that can expose your
company not only to tremendous
costs but risk from data that should
not even have been retained.
Beyond crisis management,
the business intelligence locked
within an organization’s data has
tremendous potential to add value
and mitigate risk. For example,
compliance monitoring is emerg-
ing as a soon-to-be standard part of
in-house counsels’ arsenal. Effective
compliance monitoring depends
almost entirely on employing
analytics across structured data
sets, which is only really enabled
