Could courts derail unified communications?

If your company is hit with a lawsuit, it’s very likely that you’ll have to produce relevant e-mail during the discovery phase of the lawsuit, a likelihood increased significantly by the new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that went into effect on December 1, 2006.

If your company is hit with a lawsuit, it’s very likely that you’ll have to produce relevant e-mail during the discovery phase of the lawsuit, a likelihood increased significantly by the new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that went into effect on December 1, 2006.

Consequently, you’ll have to go through the arduous process of extracting relevant data from backup tapes to satisfy the discovery order, or you’ll have to go through the much less painful task of conducting a search for the data through your archiving system.

However, imagine a scenario in which you have deployed a unified communications system and your employees’ voicemails and faxes are now stored in the messaging system. Now imagine that a judge presiding over a lawsuit brought against your company issues an order that all relevant messaging system content from your senior managers going back two years must be produced. In a unified communication system, the bits that make up an e-mail are indistinguishable from the bits that make up a voicemail or a fax. It’s conceivable, therefore, that a judge could order all messaging system content to be produced, including voicemails and faxes.

How would you satisfy this order? There are some speech-to-text conversion technologies that could convert voicemails into text files that could then be searched for the relevant content, but these technologies are unlikely to be as reliable as they need to be in many cases. A lot of faxes could be processed with optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert their content to text files, but there are problems here, as well. In short, a lot of the content that would be contained in unified message store could be difficult to search and extract without the use of lots of manual labor to convert.

Will this slow the adoption of unified messaging? Will many senior executives or legal counsel look at this prospect and decide, given the current state of speech-to-text conversion and OCR technology, that the risks of unified communications relative to its productivity benefits are just too great?

I’d really like to get your thoughts on this issue. Please send me an e-mail and let me know your views on this.