U.S. K-12 Schools Must Comply With e-Discovery Rule

Lucas123 writes "K-12 school districts throughout the US have a daunting IT homework assignment over the summer: Develop systems that ensure their electronic documents, email and instant messages are in compliance with new federal e-discovery regulations, much in the same way corporations have been preparing over the past year. The new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) are expected to be widely enforced by the end of 2007, according to a Computerworld story. '"A lack of preparation could prove dire for K-12 school districts, which oftentimes lack technical proficiency, funding and legal expertise," said Robert Ayers, technology coordinator for the Kingston, Pa.-based Luzerne Intermediate Unit 18 school district.'"

Comments

E-Discovery?

[smartbei]

For those (like me) unaware of this terminology: (from TFA)

September 2005 updates to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) require that electronic documents -- including e-mail and perhaps even instant messaging logs -- be available as evidence in civil court cases. Observers note that widespread enforcement of the rules will likely begin by the end of 2007, a year later than expected (see "New e-discovery rules go into effect in December ").

Heh..

[Anonymous Coward]

K-12 school districts, which oftentimes lack technical proficiency

In much the same way as birds oftentimes lack gills.

Another law made by non-it people

[guruevi]

I am assigned to a committee to see how to implement these 'new' laws into our infrastructure. It's really amazing how incompetent these laws are. They require documents to be stored forever or to expire at a certain date, and as soon as it expires, nothing about the document is allowed to be found. So as soon as the document expires, somebody has to go through all backups, tapes, computers, usb sticks etc. and delete all traces of the document.

Not only is it near-impossible to implement, the only possible implementation would be a solution similar to DRM on media, which as we all know doesn't work, since you already have the content at that moment. Of course vendors like IBM and Microsoft would love to sell you their solution (that requires call-back to the central server which has to be accessible from both inside and outside the network (if you would like to use your documents elsewhere than within the office)) which not only costs a horrible amount of money, the implementation itself is flawed (as is any DRM-solution) and has so many requirements that managing and securing the solutions is going to be a major issue.

I think it's disgusting how companies and their lobby push for these impossible laws so they can sell their software.

Small businesses

[Normal Dan]

It is becoming increasingly hard for small businesses to do any business these days. Not because they are being crowded out by the larger ones, but because one must higher several employees just to do all the paperwork required to run a business.

Now they have to log all electronic communication. Why? How is an email or test message any different than calling someone on the phone or meeting face to face? Will we have to bring a tape recorder to every meeting from now on? When will it end?

ALERT! - This is all VENDOR HYPE!!!

[spiedrazer]

I manage the networks for a K-12 school district and I am being bombarded by this same info, most of it feuled by vendor FUD!! The Rules of discovery that everyone is referencing do NOT say in any way that all electronic communications need to be stored or archived in any way.

What the rules DO now officially state (which they didn't before last year) is that electronic communications must now be treated the same as traditional paper documentation.

Specifically, that means that you cant destroy any correspondance or record HAVING TO DO WITH AN ONGOING LEGAL ACTION/LITIGATION or that you can reasonaby expect may lead to litigation. For my organization, that is less than one percent of the volume of data I have. All the vendors are saying that we need to archive ALL our e-mails in a searchable database yada yada yada so that we can protect ourselves against some unknown threat that we may be found in violation of these rules. That simply isn't the case. We will be in trouble if we destroy evidenmce in an ongoing legal case, but that is about it.

What we DO need to do is insure that the HR department and others that typically deal with sensitive legal topics understand the rules, and that they should print out and save anything that they suspect could come back to bite us, like adverse personell actions. We also need to insure that building administrators do the same when it comes to discipline actions concerning students etc.

AGAIN, anyone who tells you that you NEED to archive/store ALL e-mail or other electronic documents is at best completely mis-informed (like most of the journalists parroting back the FUD)or at worst trying to scam you directly with their FUD.