At 04:20 PM 1/14/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>The following comes via Cricket Technologies. the complete opinion
>mentioned is available from their website
>
>In re Telxon Corporation Securities Litigation, No. 5:98Cv2876 (N.D. Ohio
>July 2004) (available on Cricket Website,
>www.CricketTechnologies.com/resources ) (updated on Jan/14/2005 12:45 pm EST)
>
>Categories: Production Methodology, Sanctions, Spoliation

Anyone involved in responding to requests for information related to
litigation may want to take a close look at this article.

The one thing that REALLY stands out for me here is that this production
order for documentation goes back to 2000, and what they were after at that
time were all workpapers, etc associated with filings the company made in
1996, 97, 98, and re-statements from the first two quarters of 99.  Had
they complied with the request fully at that time, they wouldn't have ever
gotten themselves into the quagmire they eventually got into... which
mainly revolved around the production of conflicting information from
different "information stores", and not keeping a good log of what
information they supplied (and when) and what sources it was supplied from.

How this relates to E-Mail Management....

This is similar to situations I've read about recently regarding the (mis)
management of e-mail being done by many organizations in an attempt to "get
a handle on the massive volume of e-mail" being generated, received and
stored by organizations.  Over and over, policies are being developed to
"manage e-mail" as if it were a record series on it's own, when in reality
it's the CONTENT of the e-mail that determines it's "recordness" and the
retention period that should be assigned to messages.

It's not uncommon for extremely large organizations to have a firewall and
an incoming e-mail server (or servers) where the e-mail is all stored on
receipt, whether from outside the organization or from local internal
gateways between employees.  Initially, these systems were used to hold the
mail until local users downloaded it from the server to their local
machines and then "processed it".  Many organizations either kept a copy on
the server (for a pre-specified number of hours/days) or would allow
employees to "store" a limited amount of mail on the incoming server (a set
volume or all messages for a set time period), but after these limits were
reached, the e-mail was purged.

The responsibility for determining if the e-mail was a record or not lied
with the recipient...  not necessarily the best situation in all cases, but
if a decent job of educating users was done, they could at least assign the
messages to one of 3 "buckets"... non-record, transitory record or
record... and then if they did a little better work on the "record stuff",
it could be handled in an manner that would ensue it was retained for an
appropriate period.  The non-record stuff can be deleted when convenient,
and the transitory records can be deleted in date order, generally 1-2
years from receipt, unless there is a legal hold put ion place on them.

Along the way, the user's desktop is typically backed up to a local server,
and those tapes are held for some period of time determined by whoever the
IT/IS administrator is that manages the servers and their backups, and this
is generally done in accordance with some IT policy/practice that
(hopefully) the RIM department was involved in developing the retention
for.  And if the local user's e-mail store ever crashes, then (hopefully)
the store of record and transitory record e-mails can be re-built from
these backups.

Now, what we're seeing done more often is organizations are making "copies"
of ALL incoming e-mail at the incoming server and writing all of these
messages to an "E-mail Management System", which is simply a MASSIVE store
of all of the messages, and in some cases, these "EMS" perform some level
of indexing of the messages, maybe based on recipient name, date, subject
and in some extreme cases, they go all the way to the level of CONTENT
INDEXING all the messages.  However, the messages are then handled in a
manner typically determined by the IT/IS organization responsible for
managing the system and the related data stores they generate... and
similar to the statement above about local server backups, this is
generally done in accordance with some IT policy/practice that (hopefully)
the RIM department was involved in developing the retention for.

The problem is the existence of these "EMS" are seldom made known to the
users in the organization and what this results in is a situation where
multiple copies of some information is being managed by different parts of
the organization, with neither of them communicating about who is doing
what and why and IF RIM isn't involved in the process, many records (and
some non-records) being retained either much longer then necessary or being
discarded much sooner than required... and in the event of a legal action,
the strong possibility that the organization will find itself in a
situation similar to what happened to Price-Waterhouse-Coopers in the case
above.

In addition, the fact that an organization HAS a retention schedule and an
RIM Policy in-force, but it's not being followed universally by the entire
organization can be potentially viewed as spoliation.

Now, isn't it time that WE as RIMs start taking a different stance on the
management of e-mail and maybe we should start making some noise about some
of the manners in which information is being managed within our
organizations?  I'm not advocating anarchy here, only education and
communication.  In many cases WE as RIMs need to be better educated about
what our organizations are doing and what our policies and practices are,
but also, in many cases our ORGANIZATIONS need to be better educated that
there are existing policies and practices that they may be out of
compliance with, and that "C" word is a big thing over the past few years.

Larry

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Larry Medina
...not all information is created equal !!

LLNL Records and Archives Group
B-411, Room 1307   2-7628
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