The Importance of E-mail Discovery and Recovery
Recent surveys reveal that over two-thirds of a company’s intellectual property is contained in its e-mail. The widespread use of e-mail has created a critical challenge for organizations as they must attain the ability to rapidly recover lost, corrupted or deleted e-mail related items. Additionally they must have the capability to search and retrieve e-mail records for business intelligence or in response to regulations, litigation or other internal discovery actions.
Internal Recovery
As the value of data within e-mail has increased organizations more and more are faced with urgent demands for recovery of e-mail items such as messages, appointments, documents, and contacts or entire mailboxes that have been purposely or mistakenly deleted.
Business Intelligence
Companies are also recognizing that e-mail contains substantial amounts of business intelligence. When employees with key business knowledge leave the organization, preserving their e-mail helps to retain much of that valuable information.
Internal Discovery
Organizations are increasingly faced with internal demand for e-mail discovery, often by human resources and legal staff. Personnel issues can often be resolved by analyzing e-mail content. Likewise, concerns about the potential loss of intellectual property can often be resolved by analyzing the e-mail records of employees.
Regulation Based Discovery
Compliance with Federal and state regulations that mandate the preservation of e-mail content as business records are a major force driving the need for e-mail discovery.
Legal Discovery
New amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), effective as of December 1, 2006, define electronically stored information and its role in electronic discovery. The FRCP specifies how electronic information must be produced for legal discovery and how it must be preserved when litigation is pending. For example, it is no longer acceptable for organizations to produce electronic information in non-native formats—such as printing an e-mail message on paper
E-Discovery process requirements (Rule 26, 34)
- Defines “Electronically Stored Information”
- Requires early conference between parties in E-Discovery process
Standards around “legal holds” (Rule 37)
- Prevent loss of information involved in litigation
- Begins “when a party is under a duty to preserve information because of a pending or reasonably anticipated litigation.”
Requirements around production formats (Rule 34)
- Requesting party specifies form of production
- Default production format is “native” files
All of these external and internal issues are driving the need to preserve historical e-mail content and make it accessible for recovery, audits, legal discovery, and internal investigations. The core challenge facing all organizations, then, is how to enable fast and efficient e-mail discovery and recovery.
E-Discovery and Recovery Problems
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