But the eDiscovery Costs!

As a records manager, I have no problem with keeping email with valuable content as long as it is useful, but way keep a decade plus of all that other "stuff" that has no value? When litigation comes (and it will come) someone will have to sort through all of it when and search tools are only of limited use. Besides, while storage itself may be "cheap" (debatable), the cost of supporting that storage is not. At 25+ terabytes and counting, I know that many of my legal department colleagues and I are looking forward to some serious deletion.

Could you please comment on things like Voice Mail and Fax? In many systems these are now attachments to eMails....or are purposely kept separate "so we don't need to retain them". Doesn't the Federal Rules for Civil Procedures treatment of ESI make that "keep it separate" thinking dangerous for all the same reasons you've discussed here in regards to eMail? I'd love to see you address this topic at some point! Thx

You're exactly right. Any electronicallly stored information -- voicemails and faxes included -- should be retained for discovery purposes. While a judge could rule that voicemails, for example, don't need to be included as part of a discovery order, he or she could rule that if they're stored electronically they are subject to review.

There is no valid reason to keep ESI longer than necessary for a) business purposes and b) legal or regulatory requirements. Implementing an automatic delete policy (60 days to 365 days) is a sound business practice. Email is a communication tool--not a business records repository in most businesses.

In addition to the cost of storage and archiving software (read the blog as an advertisement) you must consider that if litigation occurs someone (read lawyers as several hundred $$ per hour) are going to have to sift through all of that email to determine whether it is relevant to the lawsuit (or worse, the DOJ investigation).

All of those emails and IMs that would have been telephone calls in the past ("Want to go to lunch, now." "Sorry, can't make it yet." Etc.) are clogging up your servers and costing you dearly when the eventual lawsuit gets filed.

To minimize an organization's risk in retaining email (and any other records, paper or electronic), organizations should manage all records based on the content of the record. Records retention policies should be created based on this record content, and followed consistently regardless of the media format. When a record has reached the end of its life cycle, that record should be destroyed in the normal course of business. Courts look favorably on organizations that manage their records based on this content approach, versus managing records haphazardly, based on which media format it happens to be stored in.

Keeping email for very short time periods or very long term periods is not the answer. The question that needs to be asked is what is the value (legal, regulatory, business need) of the records content, and then manage accordingly.

Electronic records management systems (ERMS) are available to help organizations manage the retention of their records using this content approach. There is also a national (ANSI) standard and technical report dedicated to this subject: "Requirements for Managing Electronic Messages as Records" (ANSI/ARMA 9-2004) and "Procedures and Issues in Managing Electronic Messages as Records" (ANSI/ARMA TR-02-2007).

Kevin Joerling, CRM

Sr. Manager, Standards & Records Management

www.arma.org

i'd like to retrieve if possible old e-mail from this subject pls