1 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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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

• 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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• 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.

E-Mail Management and Retention

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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 E-

Mail. 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]