Synopsis Part 1: Improving legal counsel’s mood with electronic data discovery tools
Electronic
data discovery Interview – Aaref Hilaly, Chief Executive Officer, Clearwell Systems (Part 1 of 3)
Aaref brings extensive technology, entrepreneurial management, and Fortune 500 consulting expertise to his position. Prior to Clearwell, he was Co-Founder, President and CEO of CenterRun, which he led from inception in 2000 to its acquisition by Sun Microsystems (NYSE:SUN) in August 2003. CenterRun was a leading provider of application provisioning software and today forms the basis of Sun’s data center automation product suite.
By Joshua Konkle writing for dcig.com
www.dcig.com
Joshua Konkle: In your work with corporate legal counsel how do you help them synchronize their policies and their IT, what is the mood of legal counsel out there?
Aaref Hilaly: Legal counsels are embracing the fact that eDiscovery cannot be outsourced to outside counsel – it has become too expensive, it is too important for the case, and as the Qualcomm case has proven, they are ultimately responsible for it. So, they are rolling up their sleeves and working with IT to address their specific challenges.
Joshua Konkle: There seems to be a disconnect between retention policies as written by legal counsel and technology capability. What is your experience as a technology provider?
Aaref Hilaly: We find that most companies are struggling to come to an agreement on retention policies. Companies have cross-functional teams actively discussing the issue, but very few companies have agreement and have implemented the policies. Several financial services firms have to keep data for 7 years as mandated by the SEC, but they still have tape backups containing data dating back many more years. No one in the organization wants to give the order to delete data.
Joshua Konkle: How do you educate legal counsel on IT?
Aaref Hilaly: Our focus has been to provide solutions that eliminate the reliance on IT. Clearwell is up and running in less than 25 minutes and the appliance delivery model make sit very easy to deploy and maintain.
Part 2 and 3 of DCIGs interview with Mr. Aaref Hilaly will appear later this month.
If you would like to communicate with him directly, he can be reached at www.clearwellsystems.com or in his Mountain View, CA office at 650 526 0600.
www.dcig.com publishes weekly interviews with legal professionals; click here for more eDiscovery interviews or sign up for the feed.