I've only been in a court of law once in my life. It was an employee issue, and my contribution to the alleged unfair treatment was that I failed to update the date on a website job advert so it looked like we advertised externally a week before notifying internally. Turns out from our recent survey that for 25% of organizations, a senior IT person has been required to attend/testify in court as to the validity of electronic records management procedures. Overall, 34% of organizations have had issues over the completeness of their electronic information in a court case or potential court case, with nearly half of them due to emails. A similar number reported issues with regulatory authorities due to poor electronic records-keeping.
What's also interesting is that 26% admitted that un-deleted records (electronic or paper), held beyond their retention period, had affected the strength of a court case. Now I always wondered in these situations if it wasn't just as likely the uneccessarily retained records would win the case as much as loose it, but in the survey, these records from the closet were twice as likely to weaken the case as strengthen it. On top of that, the necessity to review records in the dicovery process that could/should have been deleted is a major cost factor. And by the way, if you have deletion policies, you need a demonstrable hold mechanism to prevent "accidental" deletion of records that have been discovered. In the survey, 30% said they rely on instructions to staff not to delete...!
The whole survey report is free to download now from: here
