Legal Research, eDiscovery, Litigation
Litigation happens. Whether it is from unhappy customers, vendors, employees, or stockholders or even from being out of compliance with industry regulations or legislation.
When it happens, there are usually investigations into vast amounts of communications, many of these are historical e-mails from certain individuals, or with certain subject matter, or within a certain timeframe. There are many variables by which a case may want information searched.
You need to hire expensive legal investigators, to spend many hours manually looking through thousands of emails for relevant data. And if the user deleted it, it is gone.
Secondarily, if you manage the legal department, you want to reduce the corporation's liability and risk potential in every way possible. Email Acceptable Usage Policies are an important part, but without true knowledge of email use and abuse patterns, there is no way to truly enforce the policy, which leads to increased exposure.
Important Questions to ask your Legal Counsel
As an executive, you should be very concerned at the lack of infrastructure, process and controls for archiving email in your organization. You should ask your management team these important questions. If they cannot answer these questions, you may be placing your company at serious risk.
1. What would be the cost or damage if your company had to pay penalty fines, or if you were fined or sanctioned for non-compliance?
2. Do you have an Email Acceptable Usage Policy? Do all of your employees know it?
3. How do you know when your policy has been broken? How do you measure, manage and enforce your policy?
4. How many times has an employee emailed confidential information in error? Or on purpose?
5. How do you know if employees are emailing offensive material to others within or outside the company?
6. What percentage of your company email is non-work related?
7. How many gigabytes of pictures, music and movie files travel through your company each week?
Internal Investigations
* Sexual harassment
* Ethnic slurs
* Age discrimination
* Communications with competitors
* Leaking of confidential information
* Inappropriate pictures |
* Employees stealing secrets
* Angry employees
* Ex-employees contacting current employees
* Employees running side businesses
* Suspicious behavior
* Leaks to the press |
When you have suspicions about an employee, the first thing you should do is look into their mailbox to see if there is any incriminating evidence. Of course, most smart employees have already covered their trail by deleting the messages that you are seeking. Unless you are involved in a legal incident, it is not cost effective to have IT comb through old back up tapes looking for the needle in the haystack.
In seconds you can search for words in the subject, message body, attachment text and even attachment types over any date period.
Important Questions to ask your Legal Counsel
* Do you have an Email Acceptable Usage Policy? Do all of your employees know it?
* How do you know when your policy has been broken? How do you measure, manage and enforce your policy?
* How many times has an employee emailed confidential information in error? Or on purpose?
* How do you know if employees are emailing offensive material to others within or outside the company?
* What percentage of your company email is non-work related?
* How many gigabytes of pictures, music and movie files travel through your company each week?
Legal eDiscovery
Litigation happens. Whether it is from unhappy customers, vendors, employees, or stockholders or even from being out of compliance with industry regulations or legislation.
When it happens, there are usually investigations into vast amounts of communications, many of these are historical e-mails from certain individuals, or with certain subject matter, or within a certain timeframe. There are many variables by which a case may want information searched.
You need to hire expensive legal investigators, to spend many hours manually looking through thousands of emails for relevant data. And if the user deleted it, it is gone.
Your legal staff can perform extensive, multi-faceted forensic research on all email communications immediately, all through an easy to use, secure, web-based interface.
* Fast searching by in house staff
* Only present outside counsel with relevant emails
* "Tag" emails - Privileged, Responsive, Needs Review, Case #, Confidential, or any other tag you create
* Export messages to PST
* Lower your legal costs for reviewing emails
* Be prepared for meet and confer sessions
* Find evidence to litigate or settle faster
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