More Lawsuits = Need for In-house eDiscovery Infrastructure
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).
What’s a company to do? First, realize that keeping the data around is not the risk. What do I mean? I spent the last week listening to lawyers talk about wanting to get rid of data as quickly as possible, when what they should want to do is better manage that information so they can find what they need as quickly and cheaply as possible.
They can then use that information for legal decision support. For example, if email is nicely archived and searchable, legal staff can quickly find the messages where investment managers talk about what junk their products are, fire those workers (to cover the company from a risk perspective), and take corrective action such as settling lawsuits without paying millions of dollars to defend a losing case.
This is the true benefit of having information like email well-managed in-house. If these companies chose to delete email every 45 days (as I heard at the conference I was at this week), they would never know they should settle and would probably fight to the end, only to find out that the email does exist somewhere that they didn’t know about.
It’s time to wake up and realize that ignorance is no longer tolerable. Get your infrastructure act together; get legal and IT and records and information management at the same table to create some reasonable policies and implement tools like email archiving that optimize IT spending, solve eDiscovery problems, and continue to allow workers access to important information.
October 23rd, 2008 at 6:30 pm
[...] More Lawsuits = Need for In-house eDiscovery Infrastructure | Email Archiving & Storage Manageme… What’s a company to do? First, realize that keeping the data around is not the risk. It’s time to wake up and realize that ignorance is no longer tolerable (tags: preservation emailarchiving) [...]