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Effective Legal Holds Policy Requires IT-Legal Interaction

By Ann O'Regan
September 28, 2006

The explosive growth in electronic communications has resulted in a corollary growth of e-mail as a primary source of legal discovery when organizations are faced with litigation. As recent high profile cases demonstrate, traditional litigation hold processes are being successfully challenged as inadequate in the context of electronic communications. The lesson, therefore, is that if a company uses technology to run its daily business operations, it will be expected to utilize similar technologies to search, collect and produce requested or subpoenaed business records. Symantec Corporation, a developer of security and availability software tools, is leveraging its own products and the expertise of both its legal and IT departments to develop and implement a litigation hold program designed to significantly reduce the time and money spent to collect and preserve e-mail records. This article summarizes some of the 'lessons learned' by Symantec as we worked with our own technology to develop our legal hold program.

Document Deletion Policies: Proceed At Your Own Risk

Until recently, companies were reasonably safe following policies that called for the deletion of all e-mail records after a short time period, typically 30-90 days. The motivation for doing so was to hold down records storage and management costs, which continue to grow year over year. According to market research firm IDC, this explosion of corporate e-mail represents not only an increase in the number of messages sent and received, but also an increase in the size of e-mail attachments. IDC reports that in 2004, the size of business e-mail volumes sent annually worldwide increased by 47% from 2003, and more than doubled from 2002 levels. See, 'Worldwide E-mail Usage 2004-2008 Forecast: Spam Today, Other Content Tomorrow,' Mark Levitt and Robert P. Mahowald, August 2004.

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