Transcript 1) Email Management and Retention

E-Mail Management and Retention
Dick Jensen
Director, Information Technology
Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
E-Mail: [email protected]
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Agenda
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The Evolution of E-Mail
E-Mail: The Adolescent Years
What are the Issues
Retention vs. Destruction
E-Mail Archiving
Records Management vs. E-Mail Management
Laws Governing E-Mail Retention
Crystal Ball
Conclusion
Open Discussion
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E-Mail Management and Retention
• Our attorneys are drowning in a barrage of E-Mail
messages. The flood is not going to stop, and the amount
of messages will continue to get deeper. We, in the
technology field, do not have the power to stop the
downpour and we must determine how we are going to
build the boats to save our attorneys from drowning.
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The Evolution of E-Mail
• Began as a disposable medium
• Casual communication
• Now treated similar to a memo or document
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E-Mail: The Adolescent Years
• Late 90s: displacing Fax and paper-based mail delivery
• A typical user handles 80-100 messages per day
• A typical 3,000-user E-Mail system handles over one
terabyte of E-Mail traffic annually
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E-Mail: The Adolescent Years –
continued
• The typical Exchange message store, assuming
messages are not deleted, fills up in less than 27
days
• According to Gartner Group, 80% of an organization's
knowledge is buried in the thousands of e-mails
pulsing through the corporate Ethernet on a daily
basis
• Server backups taking far too long
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What are the Issues
• Quantity of messages
• Spam, Viruses
• Faxes arriving via E-Mail
• Blackberry Units
• Unified Messaging
• Media – Video Clips
• Scanned Images
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What are the Issues – continued
• Restoration considerations
– How long would it take to rebuild your
server and restore the data
– Firms feel crippled when they loose
access to their E-Mail, calendar, contacts
– Painfully slow and laborious to build a
second E-Mail server, perform a restore
from tape in order to get back some
deleted E-Mail for an attorney
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What are the Issues - continued
• Typical storage locations
– Outlook PST – Corruption, difficult to manage and
search
– Document Management Systems – Manual user
involvement
– File System cumbersome for the user and they
only do it when they have time
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Retention vs. Destruction
• Why retain E-Mail?
– “Important history of my practice”
– Searchable when online
– Data contributes to our Knowledge Management
initiative
– A user may not know that a message they send could
turn out to be a key piece of evidence in a case
– Ability to demonstrate, in court, that your firm
practices a documented and firm-wide policy of
retaining all E-Mail communications
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Retention vs. Destruction continued
• Why retain E-Mail?
– What about the risk of a smoking-gun being found
• it is more likely that you will find key information
that will help your case rather than hurt it
– Robert Eisenberg, National Law Journal
– manage the risk, don’t eliminate it
• Purge the junk mail first
• Delete non-important messages
• Manually file client correspondence
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Retention vs. Destruction continued
• E-Mail Shredders
– online services that encrypt E-Mail and destroy the
keys after a period of time
– messages are not actually deleted and only the
encryption keys are removed
– a Forensic record can be established that there
was a message (sender, receiver, date, time)
• E-Mail can never really be destroyed
– messages traverse intermediary computers
– recipients can retain and forward messages
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E-Mail Archiving
• Server level, set it and forget it
• Rules-based system to allow for different types of
users
– leave more data in mailbox for road warriors
• Ability to respond to discovery requests much more
quickly and at a greatly reduced cost
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E-Mail Archiving – continued
• Ability to search all folders with one search
– contents
of
attachments,
all
E-Mail
folders
including custom folders
• Automatically inherit mailbox user rights
– assistants
generally
have
access
to
some
information in their attorney’s mailbox
• Access to archive remotely via standard remote
access products
• Can be implemented with minimal user training
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Records Management vs. E-Mail
Management
• What is the difference?
– The records management discipline is a well
documented set of procedures and systems to
preserve records for predetermined periods of
time based on their value
• What is a record?
– Related to business function of legal obligation
– Recorded in some useable form
– Authentic and reliable
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Laws Governing E-Mail Retention
• There are few, if any, laws that deal directly with EMail. There are cases where courts are starting to
treat E-Mail as normal business documents
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Crystal Ball
• Use your E-Mail archive system as a backup tool so
that a single E-Mail message can be easily recovered
by the user themselves
• Comb your E-Mail data repository as part of your
Knowledge management initiative
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Conclusion
• There are numerous tools to assist with building the
boats to save our attorneys from the E-Mail flood.
You need to evaluate what kind of boat your firm
needs and choose a company who can build it for
you
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E-Mail Management and Retention
Dick Jensen
Director, Information Technology
Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
E-Mail: [email protected]
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