Editor: As we enter 2012, what should law firms and corporations be looking out for?
Sklar: There are going to be several drivers of both corporate and law firm action, and certainly one of the larger ones – and one which remains a driving issue from 2011 – is the volume of information being produced.
Editor: How does that relate to over-preservation?
Sklar: When people think about the data explosion, they tend to think in static terms – they visualize a vast warehouse filled with electronic data. A better analogy might be that of an ever-expanding pipeline throwing new data into a pool. We have an unwieldy amount of information coming in every single day that threatens to overwhelm us, and this pipeline isn’t feeding into an empty pool – it’s feeding into a pool that is already overflowing.
This means that we have to address over-preservation from the standpoint of both handling incoming data as well as remediating old data. Uncontrolled data is both an information risk issue and an information governance issue.