Will a wiki put your company at risk?

In a discussion about collaboration, I was asked if wikis are likely to increase a company's risk of exposure if the company is sued and the wiki is produced for discovery. The full audit trail of revisions was of particular concern. It is not something I had considered before, so I would be interested in views and experience on the subject.

The concern is valid even if your organisation is not ominously trying to defraud honest people or plotting to release faulty products. The cost of litigation itself is high; having swathes of paralegals and lawyers sifting through revisions in a wiki can consume lots of billable hours.

My take is that wikis are risk neutral. Information will find its way in an organisation regardless of the tools available. If wikis are not used, information sits in emails or documents. Discovery requests for emails and documents are frequent. Companies that comply with SEC rules have to keep logs of instant messaging conversations. There are cases where voice mails have been produced to plaintiffs and in some companies phone conversations are recorded as well. It seems that if information is communicated in a way that at some stage takes electronic form, it would be available for legal discovery.

The "If you want to keep something secret, don't tell anyone"-approach probably works best. Wiki or no wiki.

Tags: wiki risk liability legal discovery legal discovery disclosure SEC compliance collaboration

Comments

[Jim McGee]

My naive view would be that both wikis and blogs would ultimately prove better from a litigation risk perspective. My logic is that for this category of tool, both context and revision history are embedded in a way that makes it harder to successfully focus on a single message as some sort of smoking gun. Also, as more permanent forms of exchange/interaction, they might also encourage a bit more circumspection than an email or IM conversation might.