Novelis Brings E-discovery In-House

Guidance Software The parent company to Novelis Corporation, Novelis Inc., is the global leader in aluminum rolled products and aluminum can recycling. The company operates in 11 countries, has approximately 12,300 employees and reported revenue of $10.2 billion in fiscal year 2009. Novelis supplies premium aluminum sheet and foil products to automotive, transportation, packaging, construction, industrial, electronics and printing markets throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Novelis is a subsidiary of Hindalco Industries Limited, one of Asia’s largest integrated producers of aluminum and a leading copper producer. Hindalco is a flagship company of the Aditya Birla Group, a multinational conglomerate based in Mumbai, India.

Background
In Qualcomm v. Broadcom (Southern District of California, 2007) outside counsel made costly e-discovery mistakes that ended up costing Qualcomm the lawsuit. Investigators discovered more than 230,000 pages of emails, company correspondence, and memoranda after trial began, which led to the inevitable lawsuit between the client and the outside law firm. Qualcomm suffered great embarrassment that could have been avoided had the e-discovery process been staffed in-house with qualified personnel who understood the business, its processes and its data rather than relying solely on outside resources who were unfamiliar with the business.

Challenges
With mounting e-discovery fees and cases like Qualcomm in the news, the Novelis Corporation general counsel decided to bring the e-discovery process in-house. Service provider costs on one large case alone exceeded a million dollars, and the company wanted to bring these expenses under control. Given the budget crunch the legal department was facing, the question was, how fast could the capital spent be recouped in savings?

In addition to escalating service provider costs for e-discovery, internal policies required electronic data for terminated and retiring employees meeting certain management criteria be preserved with metadata unaltered during collection. The needs of the corporation demanded the law department have the best tools on the market with people knowledgeable in the legal complexities of e-discovery.

Solution
Novelis purchased the most highly respected and most often mentioned solution at industry trade shows, EnCase® eDiscovery. To support their efforts they also purchased training passports for the Novelis e-discovery team that enabled the team to get up-to-speed quickly and build a defensible, repeatable in-house process. As part of this process each team member received their EnCE® (EnCase Certified Practitioner) certification.

The company now preserves electronic data and saves case files in accordance with their electronically stored information policy. EnCase® eDiscovery is used for the acquisition of user-created information. If further review is warranted, either for a business purpose or in response to litigation, data is culled in EnCase eDiscovery and relevant information is exported and loaded into LAW PreDiscovery and Concordance.
In just nine months of using EnCase® eDiscovery, the company has saved more than $1.5 million in service provider fees.

The Future
EnCase® eDiscovery has proven to be a good solution for the corporation, as many plaintiff’s lawyers attempt to use e-discovery as a way to leverage settlements. Novelis will not be bound by the daunting costs of hiring outside counsel and third-party service providers to deal with the overbroad requests of plaintiff’s counsel and can focus on evaluating a case based on its merits alone.

In the future, the e-discovery team will focus on attaining the Guidance Software EnCEP® (EnCase® Certified eDiscovery Practitioner) certification as well as continue to use EnCase® eDiscovery software to its full advantage, allowing Novelis to focus less on service provider costs and more on the merits of the cases filed.

Learn more about EnCase® eDiscovery or watch this e-discovery webcast: “Learn where to focus your e-discovery efforts and why” with featured analyst firm, Gartner, Inc.