Archive for October, 2008

A recent New York Times article discusses how today’s financial crisis sets up a probable boom in lawsuits. Investors feel wronged by banks and financial advisors.

The creators of some of these risky investment vehicles spoke publicly of how financially sound the vehicles were while (stupidly) emailing each other about how concerned they actually were. (It still amazes me what people will put in an email – completely oblivious to just how discoverable what they write is).

I attended the ACC (Association of Corporate Counsel) trade show in Seattle this week. What’s clear to me more than ever is that we are still in an extremely immature market phase for eDiscovery.

First of all, there is a clear disconnect between legal folks, records and information management folks, and IT. Why else would the biggest records management show of the year (ARMA) in Las Vegas take place the same week as the ACC show?

According to eWeek the following 5 businesses are poised to boom during the current financial crisis:

It’s easy to pass off eDiscovery as something only highly litigious or regulated companies have to be concerned about. The financial crisis seems to be reinforcing that assumption.

A recent eWeek article talks about companies (including Mimosa) awaiting a “litigation boom.” While this is not necessarily incorrect, what is not talked about is the many advantages that organizations get from having tools in house to conduct internal investigations.

It matters not whether you are moving from Lotus Notes, GroupWise or even a previous version of Exchange. To move to Exchange Server 2007, you will need to transport your current email to a new Exchange Server. For years I have encouraged companies to take this time to thin out the messaging environments in order to make for a smoother migration but can we easily or even legally determine which items should be discarded?

Message Journaling is a shotgun approach to capturing Exchange messages, period. Because it adds an incredible load on your Microsoft Exchange servers, most administrators only turn it after a problem or issue requires it. By the time you burden your Exchange Server with Message Journaling the moment is gone and the information you need is lost or only on tape.

This is the answer to the question I am most often asked. In my first article for Mimosa, I felt it appropriate to answer this question first. Why have I left my Exchange consulting business and joined Mimosa? I made the move because Mimosa gets “it”.

Last week, the President signed into law S. 2450, a bill adding new Evidence Rule 502 to the Federal Rules of Evidence.  The legislation protects against the inadvertent waiver of the attorney-client privilege or the work product protection – but should not be interpreted as a reason to be lax in implementing eDiscovery processes.  The law stipulates that the protection is only for those that have “taken reasonable efforts to avoid disclosing privileged information and, upon learning of disclosure, promptly takes reasonable steps to rectify it.”