Monthly Archives: November 2011

Email Retention: The Sword and the Shield

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Email Retention:  The Sword and the Shield

It’s a fact- email is growing at a rapid pace and its left many organisations scratching their heads.

“What should we do with all this mail? Should we keep it or delete it? And who should make this decision- our organisation or the individual who receives the email? “

There are difficult decisions to be made when it comes to managing your masses of emails. It comes down to three main issues: intellectual property, expanding storage requirements and legal compliance. Lets have a further look at these.

Intellectual property

The vast majority of an organisation’s intellectual property is stored in individual mailboxes and cessation, continuity and knowledge retention relies on it.  Deleting emails – and therefore the source of a company’s intellectual property – must be done carefully and deliberately.

But does this mean we should keep all of our mail forever?

Expanding storage requirements

This ever-expanding mass of email must be stored somewhere.

“Storage is cheap”, I hear you say.  Yes, it can be.  But it isn’t all cheap. In fact, the storage needed for a mission-critical email server is actually very expensive.

Deleting unimportant emails and retaining the important ones might seem like a good solution but this can also be very expensive. It is far too time consuming and error-prone for an individual employee to troll through their email to decide which messages are important and which can be deleted.

It’s bound to make your head spin thinking about the time it would take to search for one deleted email and then deciding whether you should make the effort to retrieve it, if that is even possible.

Legal compliance

The third challenge with managing mail is compliance. To be legally compliant, your organisation should be able to provide email evidence on demand or, if you don’t hand over a requested email, prove that the said email is covered by a policy allowing for its deletion.

Proof of whether or not your organisation is compliant comes into play when a legal challenge is made by you or against you. If or when this happens, the integrity of your email archive will come under the spotlight.

Would your archiving system stand up to the challenge?

The Sword and the Shield

Email can and will be used against you in a court of law.  Having less of it available to be discovered has one obvious advantage. But on the flipside, it could be used against you if a deleted email could have been used as evidence in your favour or make a rightful claim.

Deletion of email must be performed strictly in accordance with a policy.  This policy must state exactly what categories of email should be retained, for how long and how email should be deleted. Your email policy should be communicated with employees and there should be clear consequences for any infringement.

The challenges with protecting intellectual property, expanding storage requirements and legal compliance can be lessened by implementing an email archiving and policy grooming software.

The benefits of email archiving software are:

  • It transfers the storage burden to an archiving database, which will likely have lower storage costs
  • It allows for single instance storage of emails and attachments, reducing the storage space taken up by duplication
  • It allows corporate intellectual property to be accessible more widely via proxy assignment of access rights and
  • It includes a policy grooming tool to ensure that email is deleted or retained according to a strict policy and then left to run unsupervised

Google’s ‘confidential’ email appeal falls flat in Oracle law suit

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Google might rule the search engine world but it doesn’t rule the courtroom.

Google has lost its bid to have an internal email from a software engineer ruled as privileged in its ongoing legal battle with Oracle.

Oracle is suing Google for allegedly using its Java programming language in the operating system for Google’s Android operating system.

During the discovery phase, Google turned over an email to Oracle which the search engine giant now wants to be kept confidential.

A Google software engineer researching alternatives to Java sent an email to the vice president of Android as well as in-house counsel saying the alternatives to Java “all suck”.

The US district judge overseeing the case ruled that just because Google labelled the email as confidential, doesn’t automatically make it privileged.

Whether this email proves to be the catalyst in this case remains to be seen as Oracle’s damages expert recommends the search engine giant pay out $US2.2 billion in damages if found guilty.

There is a lesson in this for all of us, one which Google – a world leader in collecting and storing information – may just learn the hard way.

All company emails have the potential to be used for or against you in a court, whether you think it is confidential or not.

To be on the safe side, if you don’t want an email to end up as legal evidence in future, then don’t send it.

The trial begins next year.

Sources:
http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?id=1202519829971&Judge_Google_Cant_Keep_Email_Under_Wraps_in_Oracle_Suit&slreturn=1
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9221230/Oracle_Google_trial_won_t_start_until_next_year
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/20/us-oracle-google-lawsuit-idUSTRE79J8RV20111020
http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/11/03/41181.htm
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/274531,google-spurns-oracle-22bn-android-damage-claim.aspx

How to make every meeting a winner

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Avoiding meeting room frustration Food. It’s that simple. Do your employees or colleagues burn shoe rubber running away from meetings? Want them to sprint to the board room instead? If you’re at your wits end trying to get them involved and fancy power points, video clips and colourful hand outs haven’t worked, I’m going to let you in on a secret. Food. Yep, it’s that simple. Feed the masses at your meetings and you’ll have them eating out of the palm of your hand, figuratively speaking.

Okay, it’s probably not that simple, but a hearty feast couldn’t hurt! I’ve spent my fair share of years groaning inwardly when someone called a meeting – the spontaneous ones were the worst – and I guessed many other people probably respond in a similar way. So I did a survey to find out what the general working public thinks about meetings. To be fair, I asked them what they love and hate about meetings. Here is a few take home pointers for you.

Meeting ‘loves’ 

-when the food is catered for
-comedy in presentations
-food
-interactive presentations with pictures and activities
-discussions
-handouts
-presentations that are straight-to-the-point
-being asked to take on a responsibility and everyone avoiding eye contact
-leftovers from meetings you don’t attend
-survey results in statistical form are a great sleeping aid
- getting paid to sit in a meeting

Meeting ‘hates’ 

-boring presentations (this was a popular response!)
-having to whisper
-no food
-no interaction
-long winded speakers
-monotone presenters who read straight from the power point slides
- everyone pushing bulls&*t around the room like dung beetles
-noisy extroverts who think out loud and monopolise meetings
-when no decisions are made and another meeting is called to further discuss what was supposed to be discussed at the first meeting
-when time is wasted talking about plans when you could have done the job in the time you spent discussing it in a meeting
-repetitiveness from one meeting to the next
-wanting to say ‘spit it out’ when someone takes 10 minutes and a thousand words to say something they could have done in far less time
-endless discussions of things with not enough of a concrete plan or solution so they just get discussed again in the next meeting with no resolution in sight
-people repeating what others have said just so they can say something in the meeting and feel important
- having to write up minutes after the meeting
- people’s insane belief that they are necessary for success

Can you relate to any of these? How could meetings in your workplace be improved? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Establishing an Email Retention Policy: The Legal Perspective

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A team effort is required to establish an email retention policy

In this article, B K Winstead interviews Elise Zealand, vice president and corporate counsel for Penton Media. Elise led the development of their company’s email retention policy.

Background:
Without a retention policy in place, an organization may find itself liable if they can’t produce even a single document requested in legal discovery. The chances of a legal charge of spoliation is very high.

Prior to developing a retention policy, Elise said there had been no set policy and retention habits were set by the individual users. The company also wanted to address the high cost of storing data – which may or may not be useful – for long periods of time.
Penton Media set out to create a set of rules which would ensure that only the necessary data would be stored for the appropriate period of time. Users were then educated on the legal and statutory requirements regarding data retention.

In the interview, Elise also talks about the high cost of discovery in terms of legal fees and business interruption. Most of the legal cost is due to legal counsel reviewing the produced documents to ensure they contain no privileged, confidential or proprietary information.

She also highlighted the balance between retaining the data you need versus storing unnecessary data… “You really need a process in place that protects the data that you must retain, that discards unnecessary data and that ensures that we’re not opening ourselves up to unwarranted expense and risk”.

Penton Media focused on their operational needs and legal requirements when they created their email retention policy. To assist in drafting their policy, they consulted with legal firms, Electronic Discovery software vendors and reviewed prior company practices.

Penton Media decided that above all, the policy needed to be useable and simple. Their policy is based upon an automatic deletion after six months. The only way to avoid scheduled deletion is for the user to move the mail to a protected retention folder. Data allowed to be moved to these folders is controlled and must have a business and/or legal or regulatory need. Elise said the automatic delete function makes things much easier as it leaves the auditing to the managed folders.

A lot of education was needed to teach the users about what data must be retained, especially in critical areas. The cost of the education was minimal in comparison to the cost of sorting through irrelevant data, especially during litigation.

Regarding the role of the IT department in the procress, Elise said the IT team was involved at a consultative level during the review of the policy document. IT staff then established the framework for implementation, which required a high level of collaboration between legal, IT and the users.

Elsie said it is critical for the IT department to make the company executive aware of the need for a policy to be established, focusing on the cost savings and the risk management aspects. Cooperative support and communication between IT and legal is essential.

Read the full article here. 

SilverDane recognizes that creating a policy can be a lengthy consultative process. It requires a level of specific knowledge that only comes through experience, something SilverDane is very familiar with and offers to customers. SD Archive allows for the enforcement of a policy and adheres to it.