* It's important for organizations to implement a system that allows it to comply with e-discovery requests quickly and easily
As I like to tell people when speaking on the topic of e-mail discovery, if you’re in business and you don’t believe you’ll ever be sued, you probably don’t operate a business in the United States. In 2007, for example, 15 million lawsuits will be filed in state courts. This means that hundreds of thousands of businesses will go through the discovery process – the process of searching through business records and producing information to the other parties to the suit.
The new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that took effect on December 1st of last year make Electronically Stored Information (ESI) much more discoverable and require holders of that data – including e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents that contain business records – to produce the data when needed. The new amendments require holders of ESI to provide a description of their ESI within 99 days of the commencement of a legal case.
An organization that must satisfy a discovery request for e-mail, for example, has a few options. They can store their e-mail-based business records on backup tapes and go through these tapes to search for information when needed. While doing so is fairly easy, since backup tapes are normally used to back up e-mail servers, it is extraordinarily expensive (up to $3,500 per tape according to Kroll Ontrack); very disruptive to IT staff; and time consuming.
A much better option is to use a system that is optimized for e-discovery purposes. For example, there are a variety of e-mail archiving and other tools that allow an organization to satisfy discovery requests much more quickly and with a minimum of disruption to IT staff. For example, Nassau County (New York) has implemented Clearwell Systems’ Intelligence Platform, a system that can rapidly search through all of the county’s electronic data very quickly, allowing the county to satisfy discovery requests, including those imposed by the new FRCP amendments, more quickly than would be the case if manual methods were used.
The bottom line is that every organization of more than a few employees should implement a system that will allow it to comply with e-discovery requests quickly and easily. If an organization must search through backup tapes and/or hire an outside forensics firm to do this, the cost can be extremely high – in many cases, a fraction of the cost of a manual discovery effort can more than pay for the cost of deploying an archiving or other e-discovery system.
