A Record Manager’s Dream: Automated Email Filing
From a novelty just 10 years ago to the most widely used application in existence today, the adoption of email by businesses of all shapes and sizes has been nothing short of remarkable. The rapid adoption of email as the standard form of communication for today’s businesses has reached mind-boggling numbers: IDC estimates that by 2007, 97 billion emails will be sent every day. However, in spite of the significant boost to productivity email has generated, managing that amount of data also presents a great deal of records management exposure, which has caught the attention of risk managers, the IT department, compliance officers and e-discovery support managers.
Email Horror Stories
As with many things, that which makes email such a powerful communication tool—enabling people to share almost any type of digital information with as many people as they wish in near real-time—also creates plenty of opportunity for mistakes. Whether you are an IT department dealing with retention policies and legal holds or legal department looking for the "smoking gun" email, the most frightening risk associated with email relates to the "back-end" decision of what to keep and what to delete. Lawsuits are likely to be lost and the downside can be measured in the hundreds of millions—if not billions—of dollars when email-based evidence is lost or destroyed by a party. A few recent examples are helpful in illustrating how email can get even the wealthiest, most sophisticated companies and organizations in hot water very quickly.
Intel vs. AMD: This case offers a perfect example of how complex litigation can overwhelm even the largest and most technologically advanced enterprises in the world. As part of an anti-trust lawsuit Intel was defending against its rival AMD, Intel’s litigation hold procedure broke down resulting in the loss of roughly 1,000 emails that just happened to be relevant to the lawsuit. Intel’s case was not bolstered when it revealed that the emails were inadvertently destroyed after AMD’s lawsuit had been filed and after Intel’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC) had sent out both litigation hold notices and an army of specialists
to preserve information.
White House/Republican National Committee (RNC) email scandal: In late spring of this year it came to light that numerous White House staffers—including several high ranking officials like Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez—may have been using their RNC email accounts to send and receive official White House business correspondence. One problem: the Presidential Records Act prohibits such allegedly purposeful circumvention of official White House email systems, especially when the emails in question were erased as part of the RNC’s document retention system.
For many businesses, the knee-jerk response to the above concerns has been to simply "save everything" and thereby try to avoid any email being inadvertently destroyed. Ironically enough, however, in addition to worrying about PR disasters and e-discovery sanctions for email messages that are destroyed when they shouldn’t be, many of today’s organizations are increasingly worrying about saving too much email. Simply put, in addition to the growing costs of email retention, the concern is that email that should have been deleted (as it was not required to be kept for legal or business reasons) but wasn’t might later be requested by a regulatory agency or opposing counsel to the company’s detriment—somewhat akin to a ticking time bomb.
Categorization Technology Comes of Age
Luckily, technology has matured just about the time email volumes were threatening to overwhelm organizations. Sophisticated categorization technology had been in existence for some time, but had not yet been sufficiently honed to meet the specific needs of email users; within the last few years, however, this has changed. Now incoming and outgoing email can be tagged, categorized and filed in near real-time... automatically.
The benefits from such an application are tremendous—both to the user and to all those concerned about the "back end"—and can produce an ROI that makes such an investment wildly successful. The user benefits start with the most obvious—a highly organized email system which facilitates instant access to information on any topic, especially when sophisticated search tools are standard fare. The "back-end" benefits of such a system are no less impressive. For starters, because the system identifies important content and puts it in the right place, it allows users to "keep" the important content while virtually "throwing away" what they don’t need. This is the best news a risk manager (or compliance or e-discovery support manager) can get, as it allows them to expire the "unimportant" content if and when they so desire. This in turn makes email-based records management and compliance far simpler and easier to accomplish. The implicit security controls also dramatically improve information integrity and security, while sophisticated "single object storage" methods reduce storage costs through "de-duping" and "near-duping" across all users and content. Last but not least, all of the above can be constantly measured and reported through deep chain-of-custody forensic controls, which could certainly come in handy in a lawsuit or investigation.
The bottom line is that automatic email categorization could not have come at a better time for organizations. CIOs, GCs and CEOs everywhere should take a look for themselves; not only will their staff be much more efficient and more productive, but their exposure to risk will be better managed.