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New E-Discovery Rules Benefit Some Firms
The new E-discovery rules that came into effect last Friday — clarifying federal requirements about producing electronic documents as evidence in lawsuits — may make life harder for some companies, but they will benefit others. mikesd81 writes to mention an AP article profiling companies that help businesses track and search their e-mails and other electronic data. From the article: "There are hundreds of 'e-discovery vendors' and these businesses raked in approximately $1.6 billion in 2006... That figure could double in 2007."
The new E-discovery rules that came into effect last Friday -- clarifying federal requirements about producing electronic documents as evidence in lawsuits
I think it goes something like this: "You've got nailed!"
Push Button, Receive Bacon
The company I work for had a policy that no e-mail was to be kept longer than 30 days unless it was absolutely necessary. If it was an internal e-mail, it was kind of expected that you would delete it as there would be no long term use for it. Now, like a few company policies, this one was broken even by myself a few times. Somebody would write a procedure out in e-mail and send it to the group or you could be in a hurry and you just drop an e-mail on installation instructions into the same directory as the deployment file. Under almost no circumstances were you allowed to record internal instant messaging conversations either.
It was claimed that we did this to keep the Exchange server free & not clog our hard drives with e-mail. But I really think that our lawyers speculated that since we're such a large company with subcontracters and other companies working with us that it would be best not to have these information linger. It's hard to ensure that a company with many tens of thousands of employees has everyone of them doing things that aren't illegal. It's just a problem of sheer numbers. Plus the incidences of the famous Microsoft memos about their competition. Memos about eliminating your only competition in a free market are frowned upon by the market but not exactly taboo inside the company.
Now, Friday morning, we got an e-mail saying that that has changed. That now we're supposed to keep e-mails but it didn't really say for how long. Plus it was Friday morning and an e-mail about a change in company policy was pretty high on my list of things to ignore. I'd imagine that our corporate policy is going to change to something vague and undefinable about under what circumstances you're supposed to archive it. And if a case comes up and my company is called on this Federal law that requires them to keep e-mails, it will now be the employee's fault since this e-mail was very applicable to a future case but they failed to archive it. What does that encourage me to do? Keep all my e-mails regardless of any policy.
I think the more volatile a communication is and the larger the company, the more they encourage you to destroy it. It's just a game of numbers. If you have 10,000 employees and 1 in every 100,000 e-mails is by chance something bad for the company, then each employee need only send 10 e-mails for you to have problems.
My work here is dung.
It is a really good thing that it is not possible for a malicious party to create forged emails!
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
It also benefits companys that make backup media.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I haven't read through all the new rules, but everything I've read about them say they kick in at the discovery stage of litigation. Presumably the traditional rules regarding document retention policies are still in place (if someone who has read them all knows differently, please say so). Under the regular rules Courts generally will allow you to have document retention policies, and get rid of old stuff. What you're supposed to do is whenever you have a reasonable belief that you may be sued over something, you're supposed to at that point make sure to keep whatever documents might be requested in the litigation.