Regulation and lawsuits aren't a matter of if, but when. Get prepared today with records management and e-discovery solutions.

Today, your business must be able to produce electronically stored information quickly, completely and reliably, not just for lawsuits but in response to other regulations. Failure to do so can result in fines, sanctions or even losing a make-or-break lawsuit.

An electronic records management program—with the right technology to support it—can help your business be prepared.

Due to 2006 rule changes U.S. federal courts now expect businesses to retain and quickly produce just about any electronic data a legal adversary may request in discovery, a fact-finding phase that precedes a trial.

Under the revised rules, requests for electronic data (electronic discovery, or e-discovery) are no longer restricted to a limited set of information designated as official business records. As a result, companies that do business in the U.S. (or that have U.S. partners or subsidiaries) can be hit with demands for e-mail, Web mail, text messages, databases, voicemail, video, instant messages, Wiki entries, blogs and more. If it is stored, it can be discovered.

Destroy data unthinkingly, or just lose it, and you could lose a lawsuit or regulatory challenge, too. Yet saving everything has its risks, too. Not only is storing and searching so much data nearly impossible, but keeping it can increase your legal exposure as well.

Records management refers to the process of classifying, organizing and managing information. A records management program regulates the flow of data, tracking it, storing it or destroying it according to its type and importance.

Simply put, records management helps assure that an e-mailed report on product defects is treated differently than one announcing the winner of the office sports pool—something that doesn't happen on its own.

Records management technologies ease search and retrieval of data when legal battles arise or governmental auditors ask for proof your company has been playing by the rules. In fact, there are times when simply having policies and the technology to carry them out can help show courts and regulators that your company is acting in good faith.

There are many resources for best practices for litigation readiness and records management.

The non-profit professional association ARMA International and the Electronic Discovery Reference Model industry group both offer a wealth of advice. But whether you are concerned mostly about e-discovery or compliance with other rules, the backbone of any records management program is technology.

Good technology can make or break your program. It's not enough to just toss all your records on a really big storage system and figure out how to search it later. To meet legal and compliance mandates, records management technologies must be able to:

• Capture information at the point of creation (including that in paper documents) and manage it to disposition
• Follow the full chain of custody with extensive audit trail capability
• Create and maintain legal holds, including the ability to put multiple holds on each document and holds on entire folders for case and records management purposes
• Make sure information is kept or disposed of according to corporate and legal retention policies
• Retain and archive information over long periods of time with exhaustive audit trails, business rules around deletion, and security controls
• Maintain authenticity, proof that a record is what it purports to be and has not been tampered with
• Carry out rapid search and retrieval over large volumes of information

E-mail archiving is a cost-effect and simple place to start with e-records management. An archive platform that captures e-mails generated in different applications (such as Microsoft® Exchange and Lotus Domino) as well as structured and unstructured data, and that can search across all types will give you a leg up the next time courts or regulators call.

Get prepared today with records management and e-discovery solutions.

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