This blog post is part of a series which address the necessity and benefits, of email archiving.
Managing Email Archiving Mitigating Litigation
Email archiving is an essential component in every IT environment. Archiving used to be a nice to have. But being able to save–and retrieve–email is now a must have under today’s conditions.
Litigation and Email: Inextricably Linked
For the majority of organizations, the most important reason to implement email archiving is the environment that companies, schools, government and other organizations find themselves facing with today’s litigious conditions.
The almost certain eventuality of litigation drives implementation of three specific capabilities for a company or organization:
Early case assessment
Many decision makers, when they believe that their organization might be involved in a legal action, will want to conduct an early case assessment to determine the risk they face in either defending themselves or prosecuting the case. For example, if an organization believes that a former employee may sue for wrongful termination, legal counsel will want to review relevant
emails and other documents from key employees to determine if the former employee’s case has merit.Effective email archiving software will enable decision makers to accurately and completely extract the relevant information, thus assisting them in make a well-informed, quick assessment.
Legal holds
Legal holds, sometimes called litigation holds, involve flagging and retaining all relevant emails and content when it is reasonably believed that litigation might be forthcoming, even if no formal
legal action has yet occurred. For example, in the wrongful termination case example noted above, if decision makers reasonably believe that such a case will be initiated, all relevant emails and other documents must be preserved until the legal action has been settled. An archiving system, in conjunction with appropriate retention policies, is essential in enabling legal holds.
eDiscovery
Electronic discovery is the formal process of searching for, extracting, producing and reviewing relevant information from email or other data stores based on court orders and/or other rules established during the process of litigating a case. An archiving system that can index, store and enable search of relevant content – all while protecting the integrity and the authenticity of the stored data – is a key facilitator of the eDiscovery process.
As noted, email archiving is an essential component in every IT environment. The value of selecting and implementing a system-wide archiving solution cannot be overstated. With email archiving your organization is poised to reap the benefits of wisely managed IT, human and financial resources.
For more information about this topic, download the Osterman Whitepaper “Best Practices for Managing Email Archiving”.
Photo Credit: Here We Go Again by Tim Samoff is licensed under CC BY 2.0
