The purpose of this project is to provide you with an opportunity to create a document retention policy. You will also learn how to serve a litigation hold notice for an educational institute. The following aspects of litigation and document retention are covered:
- Applicability of availability, integrity, and confidentiality (AIC) concepts
- Confidentiality of personal information and contracts
- Applicability of American Legal System in the litigation process involving corporate, public, and private institutions
- IP issues
- Risk analysis and incident response procedures
- Forensic examination
Project Scenario:
You are the Chief Information Officer for Premier College. Recently,your college has received a notice from the Department of Education about an investigation of your college based on the state-specific testing and compliance procedures. The Department of Educationhas sent a Litigation Hold Notice wherein they have asked all college staff and administrators of the college to preserve all relevant documents, records, data, contracts (regardless of its location or medium), and correspondence notes.
To understand the litigation hold notice received from the Department of Education, refer to the document titled "Project: Litigation Hold Notice" (IS3350.U7.TS4.doc) that your instructor has provided for you.
As a reminder, this Litigation Hold preservation obligation supersedes any existing statutory or regulatory document retention period or destructive schedule. The determination of what information may be potentially relevant is based upon content and substance and generally does not depend on the type of medium in which the information exists.
The information requested may exist in various forms, including paper records, hand-written notes, telephone log entries, email, and other electronic communications (including voicemail), word processing documents (including drafts, spreadsheets, databases, and calendars), telephone logs, electronic address books, personal digital assistant (PDA) like Palm Pilots and Blackberries, internet usage files, systems manuals, and network access information in their original format. All Electronically Stored Information (ESI)should be preserved in its originally created, or "native" format, along with related metadata. Relevant backup tapes and all indexes for those tapes should also be preserved. Reasonably accessible information must also be preserved, because such sources will need to be identified under compelling circumstances, and may need to be produced.If you have any doubts as to whether specific information is responsive, err on the side of preserving that information.
Deliverables
After receiving the Litigation Hold Notice, your next task is to do the following:
- Create adocument retention policy for your College that complies with all state and Federal regulations.
- Create a Litigation Hold Notice similar to the one provided to you in the handout titled "Project: Appendix A".
- Create a checklist of procedures that must be followed in order to comply with the Litigation Hold Notice.
- Prepare a summary of all your findings