Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1596
ILTA White Paper E-Mail Life Cycle 4 Jeremy Barnes Open text cOrpOratiOn B ecause e-mail just keeps on coming, one dreams of stemming the flow. Despite its unparalleled corporate value — facilitating business across geographies and time zones in ways once simply impossible — the mismanagement of e-mail has created overwhelming problems and unsustainable practices in companies of all sizes. Still, we cannot function without it. The massive volume of electronically stored information, including e-mail, creates increasingly complex and daunting challenges. Organizations invariably come to terms with a disheartening reality: Substantial corporate costs and risks, particularly those incurred throughout the e-discovery process, directly correlate to the volume of content retained. Indeed, given the process of hiring outside service providers to identify and collect content, and the billable fees incurred by lawyers to review information for relevance and privilege, it makes sense that every expense is intensified by the volume of content involved. Unfortunately, when most companies begin to evaluate their legal situation, they realize they've wound up on the horns of an e-discovery dilemma. Companies must secure and retain information or face fines and sanctions associated with the destruction of electronic evidence. Saving too much information, however, drives up costs. This is why many companies eventually endeavor to dispose of unnecessary electronic information — that is, to determine what content should or must be kept — and aggressively purge everything else. It becomes a balancing act of risk tolerance: What do we believe we can responsibly dispose of, and how do we ensure the rest is kept appropriately? Why the Unchecked Growth of Electronically Stored Information Is Unsustainable Taking the Cost and Risk Out of the Inbox: