APPA Business

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APPA Business Financial ConferenceInformation
Technology TractSession 30Caught in the Web
Challenges With e-Discovery
Vic Hatridge CIO Nashville Electric
Service vhatridge_at_nespower.com [phone]
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Two Case Studies from Nashville Electric Service

• Utility Background
• Disclaimer
• Case Study 1 2
• How e-Discovery Started
• What We Were Asked to Do
• How We Complied
• High Level Advice
• Practical Tips
• Questions Answers

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Nashville Electric ServiceBackground

• Municipal electric-only utility
• 360,000 customers in the metropolitan Nashville,
  TN area
• TVA distributor NES has no generation
• 1,000 employees

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Disclaimer

• This presentation is not intended to offer legal
  advice.
• My intention is only to raise the awareness of
  information technology professionals in dealing
  with e-Discovery

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How e-Discovery Started Case 1

• A letter from a law firm in February 2008 stated
  that their client might file a lawsuit against
  NES for discrimination in hiring and promotions.
• The lawsuit would be handled in Federal court.

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What We Were Asked To Do

• Comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure
  (and avoid huge penalties for not complying).
• Retain ALL Electronically Stored Information
  (ESI) until further notice.
• The only excluded data was transactional
  databases such as SCADA, Outage Management, CIS,
  ERP, etc.

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How We Complied

• No instructions to the general employee
  population most everything is being done by
  I.T. behind the scenes.
• No way to build an ESI archive since the data
  would change constantly.
• Daily incremental backups of all files and
  messages.
• Backup tapes would never be reused.
• All email messages would be archived - except for
  SPAM that we block from being delivered.

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How We Complied Voice Mail

• Voice mail had always been a revolving data store
  where messages couldnt be kept for over 60 days.
• We had to start saving all voice messages.
• We did this by upgrading to a Unified Messaging
  version of our voice mail system which now stores
  all messages in MS Exchange where they are
  archived.

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How We Complied

• I.T. had to bear the added expense of additional
  disk storage, additional backup tapes, storage
  cabinets for backup tapes, new voice mail
  software, etc.
• The status of the lawsuit is still pending, so we
  have to continue what we are doing indefinitely.

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High Level Advice

• I.T. should work with Legal Counsel to stay
  informed of the applicable ESI rules. Many
  states have now adopted e-Discovery.
• I.T. should participate in all e-Discovery
  projects.
• Establish written policies and procedures for
  handling ESI, including data retention policies
  what do you keep, what do you NOT keep.
• Know your data.

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Practical Tips

• Clean up your ESI BEFORE you encounter a
  Litigation Hold.
• Recognize that employees will keep information
  beyond the established retention date.

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How e-Discovery Started Case 2

• A lawsuit and counter-lawsuit were filed in
  Federal court.
• Attorneys for both sides requested documents and
  messages from named custodians.

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What We Were Asked To Do

• Assemble an ESI repository of all messages and
  files in the custody of the named custodians on a
  specific date.
• Many custodians were still active employees some
  were retired some had resigned one was
  deceased.
• Track down messages and files of non-active
  employees if they had been transferred to others
  or placed in other locations.

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How We Complied

• Immediately instructed all custodians not to
  delete or change anything.
• Tried to identify all the messages and files for
  the custodians and where they were located.
• Instructed custodians to assemble messages and
  files that were not on the network C
  drive, CDs, etc. and to copy them to a
  designated area on the network.
• Purchased Symantec e-Vault software and trained
  key I.T. employees in its use.
• Built the ESI repository in e-Vault.

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How We Complied Search

• Lawyers sparred for some time to agree on the
  search terms to be used. The requestor will
  usually use the broadest terms and the responder
  will try to narrow it down.
• I.T. Coordinator (me) was asked to perform a
  number of searches to determine the number of
  hits on various terms. Results were tested for
  reasonableness.
• E-Vault had to be adjusted to enable accurate
  searches. As files were added, they were indexed
  in Google fashion. At one point, our index
  sensitivity was set too low and almost nothing
  could be found.

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How We Complied Search

• Search terms had to be negotiated based on the
  capabilities of the e-Vault software.
• No wildcards in the first three letters of a term
• No direct support for within x words
• No support for phonetic searches
• No support for case sensitivity
• The final searches ran for about a week.

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How We Complied - Production

• Produced PST files and file shares for all the
  search results.
• Over 1,112,633 emails 130GB
• Over 41,592 files 21GB
• Delivered to our attorneys on USB hard drives or
  DVD.
• Results were loaded into the attorneys
  e-Discovery software for further review.
• Our attorneys estimated that we would have paid
  about 500,000 if we had contracted out the
  search and production.

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High Level Advice

• Get your email archiving process in place TODAY.
• Consider data retention/archiving rules.
• Consider users who save things beyond the archive
  date.
• Decide if buy a search tool now or later?
• Remember that search features do make a
  difference.

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Practical Tips

• Email journaling/archiving is pretty easy going
  forward.
• PSTs will be your biggest challenge.
• It isnt hard to ingest PSTs into your archive.
• But, it is VERY HARD to associate these PSTs
  with their originator and provide them easy
  search.
• Users will hate having to search both their
  current folders and the archive. Remember that
  the CEO will face the same challenges as everyone
  else. You will not be popular.

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Questions/Answers