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Deleting Emails Costs Morgan Stanley $1.45B
DoubleWhopper writes "The financial giant Morgan Stanley lost a $1.45 billion judgement yesterday due, in part, to their failure to retain old email. The judge in the case, 'frustrated at Morgan Stanley's repeated failure to provide [the plaintiff's] attorneys with e-mails, handed down a pretrial ruling that effectively found the bank had conspired to defraud' their former client. The CEO of a record retention software company noted, 'Morgan Stanley is going to be a harbinger'."
Big investment firms like Morgan Stanley are obligated by law to retain lots of records. This is more of an "Almighty Buck" type of story, IMO.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I think the issue is "selective memory loss" - Microsoft plays this card all the time in court. Emails from a relevant time period are "deleted" when convenient, while older or newer or even contemporaneous mail is saved... the judge in this case was simply smart enough to call shenanigans.
You can delete old email if you're that hard up for space, just have a rock-solid deletion policy you can prove you adhered to in a court of law.
It also helps to audit your archives and backups regularly, and document what data was lost when. 'Cuz face it, every admin at some point or other loses some data to corruption, hardware failure, bookeeping mixups or user error. Knowing what you forgot and when you forgot it can help in situations where not having the data on hand can cost a billion bucks or so.
SoupIsGood Food
where are my moderator points when I need them.
Most companies purposefully choose short retention policies, in an attempt to avoid these kinds of settlements... it isn't a sysadmin's fault.
The theory was that this would let them discard old emails without having it be intentional obstruction of justice. I guess that theory will be out the window now.
Think about it...
If it can cost Morgan-Stanley $1.5 billion for not storing email. And 90% of email is SPAM. The risk of deleting/filtering SPAM and losing valid email is going to be too risky.
Therefore, it will become extremely cost effective for Morgan-Stanley (and other large firms) to hire lobbyists to make unsolicited SPAM (with no valid return email addresses) illegal, criminal, and enforced.