All across the country among organizations large, small and everywhere in between, e-mail is becoming the de facto standard for communication. E-mail messages are exchanged in rapid succession, back and forth between employees, office divisions, and entire companies – on average 150 times a day per mailbox. Strategic decisions are made, customer service is offered, business is conducted… and all in an effort to improve communication and keep a competitive edge in the rapid pace of today’s business environment. But the sheer volume of e-mail coupled with the sometimes sensitive and confidential nature of its contents have created an enormous challenge and serious management risk for legal discovery.
There are an ever-increasing number of federal rules and regulations that dictate the process of preserving and storing e-mail messages for record keeping. In addtion to those already in existence – HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority), The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, The Graham-Leech-Bliley Act – more and more industries are developing regulatory practices and process focused on keeping personal information secure, separate and intact. In 2002, agency fines and increased scrutiny on the financial industry caused more and more companies to realize the importance of accurate record-keeping and to implement those processes developed to preserve electronic data.
Legal discovery is beginning its own adventure into the precarious world of e-mail and electronic documents, recognizing the need for both individuals and companies to manage and preserve electronic information, especially e-mail. Legal requests to search e-mail accounts come in from every direction, both internally and externally, and companies are experiencing great pressure to have an e-mail retention policy in place for this reason. According to a recent study by Osterman Research, approximately 75% of corporations in the United States have been required to produce e-mail in litigation and 74% of organizations surveyed rely on some combination of backup tapes and local message stores to produce the required data set for litigation discovery requests.
Because of the vast size of even a small- to mid-size company’s e-mail data and because of the ever-increasing requests to produce e-mail, companies are forced to pay the added cost of searching and retrieving data from these backup systems and archival resources in order to produce that data. But the buck never stops there. Those high costs of searching, culling, filtering and processing are almost always passed along to either the plaintiff or the defendant in a civil matter and in 2010, the estimated cost of searching those backup tapes is close to $4000 per tape, bringing the total cost for e-mail production for a mid- to large-size company in a litigation matter somewhere into the thousands, maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Add a forensic requirement to that and you may have costs well into the millions of dollars.
So where do we go from here? It seems like litigants are stuck with paying the high cost of e-mail retrieval without some system in place to reduce the costs for searching, culling, filtering and processing data. Imaging & Video Resources is Alabama’s premiere resource for forensic and legal discovery of electronic data and e-mail. We have partnerships with digital forensics companies across the country and in-house eDiscovery processing services available that create a secure chain-of-custody and reduce cross-processing costs among specialty service providers. Whether you need support for in-house discovery processing or a complete outsource at your fingertips, Imaging & Video Resources strives to make your eDiscovery project quick and thorough, saving you the added cost of retrieving additional information later. We have software in place to integrate your e-mail discovery with your current document review software or hosting services to allow you to perform your own keyword searches and make notes on your documents anywhere you have an internet connection. Whether you need a little direction or a lot, Imaging & Video Resources is your complete solution for eDiscovery.
