I agree wholeheartedly with Mary.  This is a lot less an RM issue than it is
basic business contingency planning.  Placing your data within the *complete
* control of a vendor is too risky, since your core business depends on that
data.  Even if your study finds that the vendor db is indeed more robust
than one you can control yourself, insist that regular exports are provided
(or are available for your staff to process), provide exception reports on
both a short and long term basis (including db downtime, failures, or other
issues), and allow random auditing (to ensure they are not processing data
of any type on a catch-up basis).  Backups on the vendor's servers should
also be available to you at all times, day, night, weekend, etc.  IT support
may be an issue for their web access portals...there are so many factors to
consider I believe that maintaining your own metadata is vital to any
business.

Sad to say, I learned some of this after helping our clients partner with
providers of, say, imaging services, only to learn that the company handled
the data (or the health of their own business!) poorly, especially when
considering a law firm may have hundreds of millions of dollars on the line
on just one case...I'm in San Diego, and believe that among other factors,
these database management issues led to the downfall of quite a few
high-profile class action firms here in town over the past decade or so.

Joe Gerber        managing partner
*Y C O L O G Y    |     sustainable storage systems       *phone +1 760 420
2257         skype  ycology       email [log in to unmask]       web
ycology.com



On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 2:22 PM, Hilliard, Mary <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Pilar,
> In answer to your question about maintaining internal records about your
> firm's information in an internal database vs. relying on the storage
> vendor's database, I don't have any specific reference materials for you,
> here are some of my thoughts in support of the maintenance of the internal
> database:
> *       Provides a check against errors in the vendor's system and a way to
> audit their billing, etc.
> *       May provide additional detail your organization requires which is
> not included in the vendor database.
> *       May provide additional functionality not offered by the vendor
> (generation of disposition notices, legal holds, etc.).
> *       Provides a way to keep confidential information about your records
> entirely under your control (i.e., there may be certain information related
> to matters that your organization feels does not need to be stored outside
> the organization)
>
> I definitely want to keep my own copies of the information which have value
> to me.  I just think that your internal records may serve a different, but
> complementary purpose to the vendors.
>
> Mary Hilliard, CRM
>
>
> List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
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