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10 Advantages to Archiving For Both Legal & IT

An email archiving solution brings value to legal, IT, and the business. The Advantages to Archiving For Both Legal & IT Departments are

An email archiving solution brings value to legal, IT, and the business.

The Advantages to Archiving For Both Legal & IT Departments are listed below:

  • Employees know that every email sent or received is kept as a company record for 7 years or longer. This insures that employees know not to waste resources on personal or frivolous mail.
  • It prevents obvious use of the organization’s email for non-business use since employees realize that every message is saved automatically.
  • Litigation hold is easy. IT marks the message in the archive. No notices to users are needed. No user can delete messages in the archive.
  • When email is reviewed internally, it is marked or “tagged” as privileged, needs review, responsive, case #, etc. and it remains with the message so future legal discovery is less expensive since messages have already been reviewed.
  • Any ediscovery action can now be satisfied with internal staff who do the searches requested, review and mark the messages (big cost reduction), and export only the relevant emails to PSTs to hand to outside counsel.
  • Outside counsel costs are lowered. There are significantly less emails to review. The litigator is familiar with the archiving solution and knows the searches produce all relevant email messages (nothing can be deleted by users from the archive). The meet and confer sessions go smoothly.
  • Their need for business intelligence is satisfied – any user or manager can search the archive by date, keywords, customer, or person to find any critical email. The “needle in the haystack” can be found in seconds.
  • IT is happy since email messages in the email server are removed after one year. Backups are smaller and recovery is easier. No more running out of disk space.
  • Depositions are easy. A simple declaration of a description of the system and procedures usually suffices.
  • Retention management is absolutely controlled. Messages can be destroyed by department, age, subject, person, content, etc. Circulate this document to IT, Legal, and company management. It can be used to start a dialog, get consensus, and get action taken.

What the Legal Department need to know

If data is getting lost or destroyed and you haven’t taken any actions to peruse an archiving solution you may be heading for some significant legal costs. Email archiving systems are not that expensive. In our experience the reduction in legal review costs on your first discovery action pays for the cost of the software. Protect your organisation – start collecting information now. You can always change your data destruction policies. Remember, you have anarchy now – people are making their own decisions. If you have a reduction in force, you may have lost years of good messages that can save you money in the future.

The Business Perspective

Protect the business – start collecting information now. You are losing valuable data because people are wasting time managing to mailbox quotas (what should I save?) or sending valuable data outside the company to personal email accounts (and you don’t know it).You can also improve productivity by letting users know you will keep everything  so they can find it if they need it. No more dragging and dropping messages into folders or wasting time housekeeping to meet mailbox quotas (that’s why executives have bigger mailboxes).

Advice for IT

IT Personnel need to bear in mind that Lawyers are not bad people. They have a tough job. They look to IT to provide the insight into how to meet obligations without huge expenses. They will probably want IT to make the investment in email archiving because they are struggling with more cases and less money. It might be helpful if IT invite them sit in on a non-technical demo of an email discovery solution.

Do you want to quickly, easily and confidentially respond to legal discovery requests ? Find out more here