Employees with Mobile Computers

The more time that your vendor spends on site, the more money you will have to pay in the end.  Sometimes the simplest hurdles can make what should be a smooth operation into a really bumpy adventure.  If your collection targets specific employees' computers, it is important to make sure those people (or at least their computers) are present when your vendor arrives.  Now that people are frequently using laptops as their primary computers, it is not uncommon for them to be taken out of the office.  In our experience, there is at least one laptop or laptop owner that cannot be located for nearly every project.  Users may be working from home that day, on vacation, or inexplicably absent.

"Hostile" Employees

Employees occasionally see a collection as an invasion of their privacy.  They can be uncooperative, act as if they are too busy to be bothered, or may even become combative.  It is common for computers to "suddenly" stop working as soon as the EDD vendor gets their hands on them.  The employee then blames the EDD vendor for what are usually pre-existing issues with their computer.  Hostile employees might also begin deleting files that they don't want people to know that they had.  These files are often unrelated to your discovery project (such as copyrighted music and movies or pornography) but mass deletion of any files does not look good during data preservation efforts.  Make sure that your client is aware of this fact.

The Company IT Person

Most companies employ an IT person or department.  These personnel can be very beneficial to a collection if they are cooperative with attorney and EDD vendor requests.  Unfortunately, this isn't always the case.  The IT person may feel that the EDD vendor is there because they did something wrong.  IT may also feel left out of what they believe to be their business, and will try to direct the collection (i.e., "You don't need to duplicate that system.").  Some IT people are also very protective of "their" computers and don't like outside entities touching what they perceive to own.

So what can you do to avoid these and other collection pitfalls?  Read our final blog in this series to find out.

(Need to catch up? Check out Part 1.)