Monthly Research Update

Experton Group Weekly IT News

E-mails Pose E-discovery Risk

By: Cal Braunstein

A new report from AIIM finds that e-mails still pose a major e-discovery risk for the majority of organizations. Enterprise-wide e-mail management initiatives are lacking in most organizations while one-third of the company's surveyed have no policy to deal with legal discovery.

Focal Points:

• According to the latest e-mail management survey by AIIM, only 10 percent of organizations have completed an enterprise-wide email management initiative, with 20 percent currently rolling out a project. Amongst the larger organizations, 17 percent have no plans to manage e-mail globally, although the remaining 29 percent are planning to start an initiative sometime in the next two years. Furthermore, some 45 percent of organizations do not have a policy on Microsoft Corp. Outlook archiving settings, which causes users to create .pst archive files on their local drives. 19 percent of respondent corporations capture important e-mails to a dedicated e-mail management system, 18 percent print e-mails and file the paper, and 45 percent file e-mails in non-shared personal Outlook folders.
• A third of organizations have no policy to deal with legal discovery while 40 percent would likely have to resort to searching back-up tapes, and 23 percent believe they would have gaps from deleted emails. Only 16 percent of 1109 respondents claim to have retention policies that would justify deleted emails. Over half of the respondents are "not confident" or only "slightly confident" that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by staff are recorded, complete, and retrievable.
• Email archiving, legal discovery, findability and storage volumes are the biggest current concerns within organizations while security and spam are now considered less of a concern by survey respondents. In addition, "sheer email overload" is reported as the biggest problem with email as a business tool, with more than 50 percent of respondents identifying this issue as a problem. This is followed closely by "finding and recovering past emails" and "keeping track of actions."

Experton Group believes failure to comply with regulatory requirements in regards to e-mail retention and legal discovery rules will poorly position corporate legal teams and expose enterprises to adverse settlements. The courts will not look favorably upon enterprises that do not consistently comply enterprise-wide with the rules and regulations that have been in place for a number of years. Furthermore, the annual cost of e-mail compliance is less than the costs associated with the expenditures borne in a single lawsuit, making the ROI case almost a no-brainer. Thus, IT executives working with legal counsel should ensure that e-mail and e-discovery policies and procedures are documented, executed, and complied with by all parties enterprise-wide.