Activating Your Information Management Shield

http://ow.ly/b9bVL

An article by Jim Shook posted on the EMC Source One Insider website.

This article provides a discussion regarding information governance practices within a corporate workplace.

The article states, "Good policies, with technology to enable and enforce them, can help insure that records and compliance information are retained for the right amount of time, while also enabling the deletion of stale and useless information which has outlived its retention period. Good information management processes insure that protected information is stored in the right place, operational efficiencies are enhanced by focusing on useful information and the e-Discovery process is easier and more efficient."

The article looks at two recent cases, and uses them as an example to illustrate the need for good records management practices.  The article states, " If your organization is looking for more reasons why good information management is valuable, two recent cases provide some great reasons:

• If you have an information governance policy, it may help you to defeat a claim for sanctions even if data has been deleted; and
• If you don’t have an information governance policy, and you delete data that was subject to compliance requirements, the lack of a policy can help to establish the bad faith necessary to award sanctions."

The referenced cases are the following:

Danny Lynn Electrical & Plumbing, LLC v. Veolia Es Solid Waste Southeast, Inc., 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 62510 (M.D. Ala. May 4, 2012), the plaintiff requested sanctions for the defendants’ alleged failure to properly implement a litigation hold. The defendant's were not sanctioned, primarily because they had set up an email archive that the court felt showed they were not acting in bad faith.

FDIC v. Malik, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 41178 (E.D.N.Y. Mar. 26, 2012) where the court also considered a spoliation motion for the deletion of emails. The email messages related to a law firm’s prior representation of a mortgage company.  In this matter the defendant was subject to sanctions, since the missing emails were also subject to a regulatory requirement, beyond the litigation hold. 

Links to both cases are provided in the article.