E-discovery, Records Management Inseparable halves?

I have just been reading the interesting article “Microsoft calls E-discovery, Records Management Inseparable halves”. Microsoft is likely to understand this more than most with the amount of litigation cases it gets involved in each year. Over the past 6 months I am seeing more savvy businesses realising they need to manage the unstructured data that resides in every business into manageable system(s). Particularly when it comes to email, a prime example of unstructured data, can contain multiple retention periods. Some paragraphs may refer to personal information, other paragraphs might refer to product liability and whilst remaining paragraphs may refer to contractual matters. Who decides what length the email should be kept for, the employee, manager or the employer? Often this is when the mistake is made; companies need to treat the disease. One needs to recognise the email system is owned by the employer and they carry the liabilities, therefore it is up to the employer to dictate and set the policy for retention. The employer should be ensuring retention policies and appropriate technologies are in place to make certain records like these are retained and can be discoverable at a later date, whether it is 6 months, 7 years or 10 years later. Could you find every email sent and received from your organisation from 3 years ago today? If not, why not? Many organisations using Cryoserver have already treated the disease with the implementation of Cryoserver, the email compliance and archiving solution. I am aware with some clientele the Cryoserver eDiscovery interfaces have been used to fight off million dollar legal cases and they have won because they had treated the disease with the implementation of the solution years earlier and can prove categorically who said what and when.

Difference between Email Archiving and Email Compliance

In a customer meeting last week I had to explain the difference between Email Archiving and Email Compliance. In my view, Email Archiving is the management of your exponentially growing email archives onto a different storage media, this might be to a local drive, into a .pst file, printing off the email onto paper and sticking it in the client files, or possibly moving the email onto alternative storage media. Personally, I feel this is not good enough! Organisations need to also look at email compliance which requires for the emails to be kept for compliance and legislative purposes in a central repository. This central repository should not be able to be tampered with any form, any access Administrator/Supervisory Access to this central repository should form part of a formal procedure with auditing to comply with the privacy legislation, notably the Data Protection Act (DPA) and Human Rights Legislation. One solution that addresses Email Archiving and Email Compliance, are the Cryoserver Appliance Solutions, www.cryoserver.com which create evidential stores of emails and moves the data to cheaper storage media.

Law firms at the cutting edge?

I have just read this article, “Lawyers try to catch up in tech world” In my experience of helping law firms over the past 5 years I have seen only a small handful of firms at the cutting edge when it comes to email compliance and archiving. These firms are no longer printing out emails and sticking them into the client files, as they have now implemented an email archiving system. As witnessed in the court room, lawyers are now questioning the credibility of emails submitted as evidence as part of a legal case which can only be achieved by storing the forensic version, including the header information with the original email. As we all know, when you print out an email and/or delete an email the header information is lost, therefore the evidential quality is lost. As we are witnessing everyday emails are being relied upon as critical evidence as part of court proceedings. At Cryoserver we have a tool that can help law firms build an evidential repository which cannot be tampered and can be trusted come a legal case. Today I am aware of a handful of law firms who are successfully using Cryoserver to aid them in providing evidence as part of multi million pound legal cases. Lets hope more law firms ditch the quill pens and steno pads...