Email Compliance Not up to IT Departments

By Greg McNevin

January 30, 2008: According to a new report from global forensic and eDiscovery expert, Stephen Mason, IT departments are “at best only the custodians of the records”, raising many questions surrounding email compliance.

Many would place email archiving and compliance as a job for IT department, however, in a new report for Forensic & Compliance Systems titled “Email and Litigation,” Mason claims the corporate secretary, typically one of the highest officers within an organisation, is the true responsible party for email compliance.

In the report, Mason uses actual court examples, including the high-profile anti-trust litigation between Intel and AMD, to highlight specific requirements and consequences of poor email archiving and compliance policies and practices.

One of the concerns raised focuses on whether an email has been altered or not. Mason points out that a common practice in many organisations – to change the subject field of an email to reflect the client or project to which it is related – actually constitutes an alteration to the document which could cause problems if it was later required for court submission.

“The evidence that comes before a court during legal proceedings reflects the way a business operates,” writes Mason. “Given that virtually every business now uses digital documents and email correspondence in such vast quantities, it is crucial that the documents relied upon by the business are retained properly.”

Mason is a visiting research fellow for Digital Evidence Research at the prestigious British Institute of International and Comparative Law and author of two recent books on the topic: Electronic Signature in Law, and E-Mail, Networks and the Internet: A Concise Guide to Compliance with the Law. He is also the editor of Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature law Review, Electronic Evidence: Disclosure, Discovery & Admissibility and Electronic Evidence.

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