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Electronic Records Management: The Legal Problem That Lurks Behind the Scenes

By Bob Tillman
February 27, 2004

You think your company has a good case. From what you can gather, the allegations that your company stole trade secrets from a rival are completely unfounded. But then you enter discovery. Your opposition requests a whole host of e-mails ' predictable these days. That's when you realize you have a problem.

Your company's paper documents are retained under a regular schedule ' then destroyed when the are no longer of use ' as a matter of policy, kept no longer than they had to be. But these days, your company produces so many electronic documents ' mostly e-mail communications ' and with that change in technology has come a change in responsibility. Instead of your corporate records manager, your computer people in IT are in charge of e-mail and other electronic documents. To them, it's data, not records. Therein lies the problem.

You quickly realize that with all the storage your IT department has added to accommodate the expanding volume of e-mails your company produces, it has had no systematic program for eliminating e-mails that are no longer needed. As a result, you learn that the amount of e-mails and related electronic documents that must be retrieved under discovery is staggering ' hundreds of thousands.

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