Back in 1982 or thereabouts I came across an intriguing concept that has been lurking in the back of my mind ever since. In those days, databases were not terribly sophisticated, word processing was still done for the most part on stand-alone machines from companies like Wang that existed quite nicely in their own eight-bit world, and PCs has only just begun to enter the marketplace.

This was a simpler time, a time when there was still active debate over which operating system would win out on the desktop.

Even so, back in those early days there was still one thing we were all sure of: the day of the "paperless office" was nearly at hand.

Roll forward a quarter of a century. We have now reached the point where most corporate data is maintained electronically and much of what appears on the printed page is actually incidental to the function of record keeping. I look around my own office and can still see ample evidence that we are no yet "paperless," but surely this is progress of a sort.

We once tracked and managed data according to file folders, tabs and so forth. Now, file folders and the like have become metaphors, and we do our managing and tracking according to the metadata tags associated with the data. The advantages of this are obvious to everyone, including the nation's attorneys.

Last spring the U.S. Supreme Court approved amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) concerning discovery of electronically stored information. FRCP Rule 34b states that "A party who produces documents for inspection shall produce them . . . as they are kept in the usual course of business..."

This will have a substantial effect on how your company must share electronically stored information the next time your corporate lawyers prepare to go to court. So it's likely you will have to come up with a whole new set of procedures to support your legal department.

Unless you really enjoy a big surprise on a Friday afternoon, I suggest you check with whoever it is at your company who is tagged with ensuring compliance with regulatory issues. A little preparation at this point is likely to save you a lot of angst down the road.

In the meantime, at the very least, understand the following:

If your firm is involved in litigation in the United States, the new federal mandates essentially require you to provide documentation to the requesting party in the same format in which your firm uses it. Thus, if you use data online and search that data electronically, you can't get away with supplying the data to the other party in hard copy.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.