The U.S. legal system made good on its promise to get stricter in compelling companies to produce electronically stored information as evidence in civil court cases. As of Dec. 1, companies and their IT departments must produce information earlier in the litigation process, and if they can’t, they’d better be ready to explain why. If you have a policy governing how long your company stores information before it’s purged, be prepared to prove that policy was in effect and enforced before the court’s request for information.