Digital Preservation  |  eDiscovery

8 Things You Need to Know About Preservation of e-Documents for Litigation and Regulatory Investigations

By: John Mancini August 31st, 2009

As regulators and courts increasingly exercise their oversight powers, it can be expected that they will hold organizations accountable to explain the evaluations which underpin their ESI (Electronically Stored Information) preservation protocols. The business impact of this heightened level of regulatory and judicial scrutiny is that enterprises that ignore the ESI preservation risks inherent in local and remote working, as well as the management of employee Web 2.0 communications, do so at their peril. Since over 93% of enterprise records are electronic, and the volume and mix of data types are exploding, millions of electronic documents are now routinely collected from all locations where an organization has custody, control, or access to electronic documents – be it in London, Lima, or Timbuktu. The dynamic nature of ESI means that critical documents can easily be overwritten, modified, destroyed, or corrupted during normal use. It does not matter whether this happens accidentally or maliciously. The result is the same – loss of potentially relevant evidence giving rise to probable criminal penalties, fines, or court sanctions for spoliation.