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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
E-mail has been used as evidence in court cases for years; the amended rules also cover electronic documents, spreadsheets, image and sound files, and database info.<\/p>\n
The amended rules explicitly state that requested information must be turned over within 120 days after a complaint has been served on a defendant. If this deadline isn’t met, it’s possible that electronic evidence could be ruled inadmissible. Or in the instance of a defendant sitting on potentially damaging evidence, courts can levy fines and other penalties.<\/p>\n
The amended rules are to CIOs what Sarbanes-Oxley was to CFOs, says Riki Fujitani, a former attorney who’s now president of IT service provider Hoike.<\/p>\n
The courts are showing their understanding that information is much easier to retrieve from modern storage technologies, while at the same time acknowledging that finding the right information on obsolete media could be just as difficult as digging up a paper document in a warehouse of filing cabinets.<\/p>\n
In a survey by Enterprise Strategy Group, 91% of 568 e-mail, database, and compliance pros at companies with more than 20,000 employees said their organizations had been issued a discovery request for e-mail last year.<\/p>\n
One thing that’s anything but ambiguous is the legal system’s disdain for companies that intentionally destroy electronically stored information. Morgan Stanley in May paid $15 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that it destroyed more than 200,000 e-mails and failed to cooperate with SEC investigators looking into Wall Street business practices.<\/p>\n
Courts have over the past six years or so changed their views on the credibility of electronic documents, says Diego Maldonado, senior VP of the government technology group within consulting firm The Newberry Group.<\/p>\n
Despite the amendments, there are still gray areas related to e-discovery.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.informationweek.com\/news\/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=TEDZYBQNAAK00QSNDLPCKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=196600853<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-regulations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4165,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1678\/revisions\/4165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}