Online Legal…

“E-mail is the digital formalin of the 21^st century” - Lance Michalson

[Formalin n. a colourless solution of formaldehyde in water used as a preservative for biological specimens etc." - OED 9th ed.]

Background

Email has become the life-blood of most companies.  It has replaced paper based and verbal communications as the single most critical element of a company’s communications infrastructure.  The vast majority of companies now consider email a viable and trusted medium for taking orders, making proposals, formalising contracts and discussing sensitive personnel issues.  Consequently company emails now contain a great deal of sensitive information that was once only stored on paper.  Many companies are now implementing email archiving products to assist manage their email.  Other reasons which are making email archiving products popular include the following:

• Storage management:  They minimise amount of online storage in email servers which means that server performance is maintained at high levels and users benefit from a mailbox of seemingly infinite size (where mailbox quotas are in place), since old messages are automatically migrated before their quota is reached;
• Disaster recovery:  An email archiving product can be configured to archive email in near real time - resulting in comparatively little data loss;
• Litigation discovery:  It is difficult to search for email records for business or legal (discovery) purposes without centralised storage and management;
• Emails have legal effect:  The Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, 25 of 2002 (ECT Act) does not permit our courts to deny the legal effect or validity of email simply because it is in electronic format.  The law of evidence applicable to paper based documents now also applies to electronic documents and people who rely on or use email can be liable for their acts or omissions;
• Duplication of attachments minimised:  Aligned and integrated with electronic content management programs, email archiving products reduce the number of multiple copies of the same attachment that may exist in various email folders, on local hard drives and on shared drives;
• Support “compliance”:  Where a company has a properly defined email archiving strategy in place, it is able to determine which emails are “records” and which emails are not and if it has a Records Management Policy and Monitoring Policy and related processes and procedures in place, it can assist companies comply with their statutory record keeping obligations, monitoring laws and good corporate governance.

Compliance

The definition of “compliance” is often based on two methodologies:  (i) a “risk management” methodology and (ii) a “best practices” methodology.  In many regulated organisations such as banks and insurance companies, “compliance” is a specific discipline that is practices within these dedicated departments.  They focus of ensuring that the

Similar:

• Email Management
• Email Archiving Compliance
• Legal concept of a “record”
• Legal effect of destroying records
• What is “information management”?