For many in-house counsel, staying afloat in today's litigation and financial environment has become increasingly difficult. The amount of data that flows through companies has exploded while compliance measures have increased and deadlines for discovery have gotten shorter. The current economic troubles can slam legal departments in several ways—not only are companies tightening their belts wherever possible, but certain types of lawsuits tend to increase during financial downturns.

According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the number of discrimination complaints increased 9 percent in 2007. The EEOC speculates that at least some of that growth is due to "changing economic conditions." If the past year is a guide, discrimination lawsuits could certainly increase as the economy looks turbulent for the foreseeable future, and organizations will be forced to continue downsizing their workforce.

For many in-house counsel, the struggle to stay on top of litigation in 2009 could get worse before it gets better. It's enough to make many wish they had a field guide to find their way through the forest of lawsuits. Fortunately, there are ways that in-house counsel can proactively prepare for litigation and regulatory and compliance issues, easing the burden of discovery while increasing the defensibility of their processes and procedures. Developing a data map of an organization's information flow is one important step.

A data map is a visual reproduction of the ways that electronically stored information (ESI) moves throughout companies, from the point it is created to its ultimate destruction as part of the organization's document retention program. At its heart, data maps address how people within the organization communicate with each other, and with others outside the organization.

A comprehensive data map provides the legal and IT departments with a guide to the employees, processes, technology, types of data, business areas, along with physical and virtual locations of data throughout a company. It includes information about data retention policies and enterprise content management programs, as well as identifying servers that contain data for various departments or functional areas within the organization. These highly effective form of information organization also takes into account high-risk issues such as the type of litigation a company is facing or is likely to face in the future.

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