If you have ever been involved in litigation, you know that the
process of finding, collecting, reviewing and producing the
evidence that supports your case is often difficult, lengthy and
expensive. As we have transitioned from a primarily paper to an
electronic world, the costs of discovery can sometimes threaten to
overwhelm all but the largest disputes. One way to minimize these
costs is by properly governing your information.
Effective information governance means establishing enterprise-wide
policies and procedures for the creation, use and retention of
information. If implementing a thorough information governance plan
seems daunting, a good first step is to start with your email,
specifically, where your email is located. (Governing how to use
email effectively and how to decrease the volume of email being
saved will be addressed in future articles.) Waiting until you are
in the middle of a lawsuit to ferret out the hidden caches where
your employees are saving and storing email is often a contributing
factor to increased litigation costs.
So, where is your email? The answer to that seemingly simple
question is often anything but simple. Email is voluminous and
ubiquitous. You send it, receive it, and forward it; you attach
documents to it, file it, archive it and even print it. When you
finally delete it, you usually don't really delete it
but merely move it from one folder -- either your "In
Box" or "Sent Items" -- to another, namely, your
"Deleted Items" folder, where it can remain forever. You
can move email to personal folders (often referred to as PSTs or
OSTs), which can be located on email servers, file servers, the
hard drives of desktops or laptops, or, as is often the case, all
of the above. Email can reside on your BlackBerrys® and smart
phones, on your personal computers, and in your personal email
accounts. You can store it on thumb drives, CDs and other portable
media, and of course, on paper. And don't forget that it exists
on back-up tapes, too!
The more places you save and store email, the more costly the
discovery process can be. So is there any way to eliminate some of
the nooks and crannies where email can be stored? Absolutely! Your
IT department can restrict user access to certain locations so that
employees are no longer able to download or copy email to the local
drive of their computer or to external media such as CDs and thumb
drives. You can require employees who use BlackBerrys® or smart
phones to conduct company business, or who use personal computers
to work remotely, to regularly sync those devices with the
appropriate server. Regular syncing will ensure that email residing
on personal hardware is duplicated on the server and, thus,
unnecessary to collect for most discovery purposes. Yet another
option to consider is prohibiting employees from using personal
email accounts to conduct company business, although this option
can be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce. Moreover, unless
you can ensure that every employee abides by this policy, you may
not make much headway in minimizing your discovery costs.
These solutions, however, only address external email locations.
There are still plenty of places to save and store email within the
confines of your company's IT infrastructure, sometimes without
even knowing that you are doing so. For example, as mentioned
above, when you "delete" an email, it just moves to a new
folder. In order to really delete it, you must
"empty" that folder. (Even items that you really
delete often can be retrieved if one spends enough money and uses
the right tools.) Your IT department can set up automatic
procedures that purge employees' "Deleted Items" and
"Sent Items" folders on a regular basis to preclude those
folders from turning into the electronic equivalent of a storage
warehouse. Your IT department also can restrict users' ability
to create PSTs completely, or, at the very least, can require users
to locate those folders on specific drives identified by IT, which
will make them easier to find.
In order to govern your company's information effectively, you
must know where that information is. While the relatively easy
steps discussed above won't decrease the volume of email that
your company maintains, they will help you narrow the scope of
where your email is located, which in turn will help minimize your
discovery costs should you become involved in litigation.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.