Archiving101.com

http://www.mimosasystems.com/html/news-pr-mimosa-systems-acquired-by-iron-mountain-02-22-10.htm

Iron Mountain Adds All-in-One, On-Premises Archive to Complement its Cloud Offerings; Company Now Capable of Managing Information Wherever it Resides

BOSTON (Feb. 22, 2010) – Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), an information management services company, today announced it has acquired Santa Clara, Calif.-based Mimosa Systems, Inc., a leader in enterprise-class content archiving solutions, for approximately $112 million in cash, subject to closing adjustments. The deal provides Iron Mountain with an integrated archive for email, SharePoint data and files, and gives the company an on-premises archiving option to complement its existing cloud-based archives.

The ability to archive and manage data both onsite, inside the customer’s firewall, and remotely in the cloud makes Iron Mountain a one-stop shop for data capture, archiving and management. It also provides the company’s customers with greater flexibility and choice for managing their information.

Additionally, the company can now capture and manage a broader range of enterprise information from so-called “edge-of-the-network” devices like desktop PCs and laptops as well as from company repositories like email stores, SharePoint servers and file systems. Many larger businesses still prefer to keep this data on their premises today. Finally, the acquisition allows Iron Mountain to extract intelligence from the information it manages both on-premises and in the cloud, advancing the company’s larger strategy to help enterprises lower the costs and risks associated with storing and managing information.

“We’re really excited about adding Mimosa Systems,” said Ramana Venkata, president of Iron Mountain Digital, the technology arm of Iron Mountain. “We acquired Mimosa because we believe it offers the best archiving technology on the market, and the company shares our philosophy to help customers reduce the cost and risk of storing and managing information. By combining Mimosa’s on-premises archive with our cloud-based technologies, Iron Mountain can now store, recover and discover digital content wherever it resides. This is a great example of the type of technology acquisition that fits well within our long-term growth strategy.”

Mimosa NearPoint™ is an enterprise archiving platform with applications for retention and disposition, eDiscovery, compliance supervision, classification, recovery, and end-user search, enabling customers to reduce risk, and lower their eDiscovery and storage costs. Mimosa has more than 1,000 enterprise customers and is recognized by industry analysts as a fast-growing, visionary archiving company.

“Enterprises today are buried in email and other forms of user-generated content, making information storage and management a complex, expensive and risky exercise,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst of the Taneja Group. “This deal strengthens Iron Mountain’s position in the market as a comprehensive provider of information management solutions. Its customers now have greater flexibility to store and manage their information onsite or in the cloud, where it makes sense for their budget and business.”

NearPoint joins a broad portfolio of content archiving, data protection and recovery, and eDiscovery solutions from Iron Mountain Digital. Customers wanting to archive email can now choose either NearPoint for onsite archiving or Iron Mountain’s Total Email Management Suite, powered by Mimecast® technology, for archiving email in the cloud. Additionally, customers can use Iron Mountain’s Digital Record Center® for Compliant Messaging for email that must meet SEC regulations and supervision.

The addition of the NearPoint content archive also offers customers an enhanced eDiscovery solution set for quickly finding content and applying legal holds across email, file and SharePoint data. For larger litigation matters, organizations can easily transfer their onsite data to Iron Mountain’s cloud solution, Stratify Legal Discovery® Service. For smaller matters or in instances where companies want to begin the eDiscovery process on their own, they can do so onsite with Iron Mountain’s early-case assessment tool for eDiscovery, eVantage™.

The Mimosa team will be retained and become an integral part of Iron Mountain Digital. The president and CEO of Mimosa Systems, T. M. Ravi, will assume the role of chief marketing officer for Iron Mountain Digital, responsible for all marketing functions and helping to drive strategy planning and execution for Iron Mountain Digital.

“It’s a win-win situation for our customers and partners who can now leverage Iron Mountain’s global reach and comprehensive information management services,” said T.M. Ravi. “The Mimosa team will play a key role in the development and execution of the company’s cloud and on-premises information management strategy.”

About Mimosa
Mimosa Systems, Inc. delivers next-generation email, file and SharePoint archiving solutions for information immediacy, discovery, and continuity. Mimosa NearPoint is the industry’s most comprehensive unstructured information management software solution for email, files, collaboration systems and instant messages, enabling archiving, eDiscovery, storage management, and recovery in a unified solution. Mimosa is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, recognized for its competencies in networking infrastructure solutions, ISV/software solutions, and advanced infrastructure solutions.

About Iron Mountain Digital
Iron Mountain Digital is the world’s leading provider of information management services for data protection and recovery, archiving, eDiscovery and intellectual property management. The technology arm of Iron Mountain Incorporated offers a comprehensive suite of solutions to thousands of companies around the world, directly and through a worldwide network of channel partners. Iron Mountain Digital is based in Southborough, Mass.

About Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM) helps organizations around the world reduce the costs and risks associated with information protection and storage. The Company offers comprehensive records management and data protection solutions, along with the expertise and experience to address complex information challenges such as rising storage costs, litigation, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain is a trusted partner to more than 140,000 corporate clients throughout North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit the Company’s Web site at www.ironmountain.com.

This morning I ran across this blog post on Delaware eDiscovery and it is a great short clip that you as readers almost certainly is going to enjoy.  Go to:  http://www.delawareediscovery.com/2010/02/articles/sources-of-esi/seventh-sign-of-the-apocalypse-movie-about-ediscovery/

This was made available earlier thiswee. The EDRM Data Set project http://edrm.net/activities/projects/data-set has 3 different sets of data available for free:

• The EDRM Data Set Enron PST files: Enron e-mail messages and attachments organized in 32 zipped files, each less than 700 MB in size, containing 168 .pst files.
• The EDRM File Formats Data Set: 381 files covering 200 file formats.
• The EDRM Internationalization Data Set: A snapshot of selected Ubuntu localization mailing list archives covering 23 languages in 724 MB of email.

 Might be good for those that would like to test some discovery on content instead of the manual created data.

In choosing an archiving solution for SharePoint, it is important to ask these questions:

• What scope of SharePoint content and metadata is captured? Some solutions capture only a portion of SharePoint content, e.g., specific documents or document collections. This kind of capture supports fine-grained recovery. Others capture not only document-type content, but also all the context data for the environment—the rich data that makes a SharePoint site interactive (lists, blog and wiki entries, front-end web server information, and more). All of this content and metadata is important for eDiscovery, compliance, and recovery; a holistic archiving solution must capture and store it all. When content and context are captured, it is possible to perform coarse-grained recovery to restore or migrate full SharePoint environments.

• How is the SharePoint content captured? Content can be captured from SharePoint continuously or periodically. Continuous capture of all content related to specific departments guarantees your needs for compliance and eDiscovery are covered.

• Does the solution provide more than just lower-cost storage? Archives provide great value in enabling the move of content from production systems to cheaper storage, but an archive that can also facilitate recovery provides even greater value. Having archiving and recovery in one solution means less complexity for IT to manage and greater operational efficiency and cost savings.

• How does the archiving solution enable end-users to access SharePoint content? When end users go to SharePoint to get their content, they don’t want to be redirected and they don’t want to search two repositories for data. Rather, the right solution will make access seamless, leaving content directly accessible through the SharePoint interface. It will also integrate seamlessly with the SharePoint search index, allowing archived content to appear in search results alongside active content. Be sure that your archiving solution enables seamless end-user access so that you don’t have to train users on new ways to access their information.

• How does the solution enable eDiscovery and retention management? Since the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) took effect in 2006, organizations have struggled to implement defensible litigation holds, especially on high-volume content sources like SharePoint. A good archiving solution will allow very granular controls over retention; that granular control stems from comprehensive capture capabilities and flexible retention rules. A unified content archive allows an organization to quickly implement item-level litigation holds and conduct eDiscovery through one simple interface.

• Is the solution part of an integrated content archiving platform? The most efficient archiving solution unifies email, file, and SharePoint archiving. Not only does this make tasks like setting litigation holds faster and easier, but it reduces storage costs by providing single-instance storage across all the content sources.

http://www.ediscoverylaw.com/2009/07/articles/news-updates/governor-schwarzenegger-signs-californias-electronic-discovery-act-to-be-effective-immediately/

After previously vetoing a prior version of the bill for budgetary reasons, Governor Schwarzenegger signed California’s Electronic Discovery Act last night, to be effective immediately. Closely tracking the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the act institutes procedures to guide the discovery of electronically stored information in California.

To read the full text of the Electronic Discovery Act, click here.

 So earlier in this week this lenghty article was posted at Onlinjournal.  It talked about how Obama quietly signed an order to dismiss the case going on to disclose the missing email from the Whitehouse during the Bush Administration.  The investigation to find the emails has cost so far 10 Million USD .. a staggering amount of money considering the fact that the emails were pretty much all found in the most unexpected places … IN PST FILES ON THE LOCAL MACHINES.

It took 10 Million dollars to figure that out?  I think that any reasonable administrator would know that there were no items in the mailboxes which generally means they were automatically downloaded to the machines.  Secondly .. it would take a quick check to verify that this was the case.  10 Million dollars?  Someone got a deal there …

To me it proves again that PST files should be banned from corporate environments.  I encourage you to read the article.

This is the unfortunate side effect of the economic downturn we are in.  We all know know people that have directly been affected by the downturn, but this NYTimes article shows that simply laying off employees isn’t going to be the last that employers will see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/business/economy/31employ.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

First layoffs, then lawsuits.

More workers are being let go as corporate layoffs that began in earnest last year have accelerated in recent weeks. And more often, people are looking around and complaining that they have been unfairly or improperly dismissed.

Former employees of Lehman Brothers, for example, say they were not given the required 60 days’ pay before their jobs vanished, while Dell is being sued over allegations of age and sex discrimination against workers, in what lawyers say are growing choruses.

Before filing many types of discrimination lawsuits, disgruntled employees must file a claim with the government. The number of such claims, which had fallen for several years, rose more than 15 percent last year on top of a smaller increase in 2007, and lawyers expect a bigger jump this year.

People take legal action out of desperation as it becomes more difficult to find new employment, said Lawrence Z. Lorber, an employment lawyer at Proskauer Rose in Washington.

“When there is no job, there is no safety valve,” he said, “so people who have issues and then lose their jobs or have some adverse employment action taken, are now much more willing to file their suits.”

But a number of laws — most of them passed in better times — also give victims of layoffs more legal arguments to draw on since the last steep recession in the early 1980s.

The suddenly unemployed may be emboldened by a sense that the Obama administration will be more aggressive in enforcing employment laws. Under the Bush administration, the number of employment lawsuits brought by the government declined for several years.

“This is the first time we’ve had major reductions in force with the full panoply of employment protections we have now,” said Joseph M. Sellers, head of the employment practice at the law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll. “We are embarking on a new phase in employment litigation.”

Though there are no statistics on total employment cases, lawyers say the number of suits is rising fast. But lawyers also say that winning an employment case is not easy.

Employees of several companies are trying to bring class-action suits — which will require a judge’s approval. Terminated employees of the furniture retailer Ethan Allen filed an age discrimination lawsuit against the company in October. Former employees of Dell, the computer maker, filed an age and sex discrimination suit against the company that same month. A veteran terminated by Lockheed Martin sued in November, claiming among other things that the company discriminated against veterans.

Individual claims, as opposed to class actions, are rising too, lawyers say. So are lawsuits on behalf of employees claiming they never received overtime pay.

In a decision in 2007, the Supreme Court effectively blocked a sex discrimination claim against Goodyear Tire and Rubber by Lilly Ledbetter, who argued that for years she had been paid less than her male colleagues. The court ruled she had to bring the case within 180 days of her employer’s initial decision to pay her less than men.

President Obama signed legislation on Thursday overturning the Supreme Court’s decision, which could open the doors to similar cases. Congress is weighing legislation to expand on laid-off workers’ rights.

Some companies, retrenching quickly or collapsing, may have violated a 1989 law requiring 60 days’ notice before laying off workers. It is the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, known as the Warn Act, and a complaint by a group of displaced workers who did not get pay for that time led to a Chicago sit-in recently. Suits claiming Warn Act violations have been filed not only against Lehman Brothers, the failed investment bank, but also against Eos, a bankrupt airline, and a pair of law firms that recently folded, Thelen and Heller Ehrman.

At Eos, employees were paid twice a month and were told of the company’s collapse days before payday, said Peter C. Mochnal, a former director of global sales for the airline and the class representative in the suit. He worked at Eos from 2005 until its bankruptcy last spring; the airline did not pay him during his last weeks at the company, nor did it pay him the amounts mandated by the Warn Act.

“My first paycheck from Air Partner came maybe two weeks into August,” said Mr. Mochnal, referring to the aviation services company where he now works. He added that he had earned more than $10,000 a month at Eos, so two months’ pay would have been substantial.

Mr. Mochnal said that he considered his family lucky. Though they had to make do with much less and relied on credit cards for a few months, they had just sold their house in Florham Park, N.J., before he lost his job. “We had moved in with my in-laws” in the same town, he said. “That is the only thing that saved us.”

With bankruptcy the only other bright spot for lawyers in this recession, some law firms are focusing on these types of cases.

“We have a Warn Act practice group that we started from scratch a year and a half ago, and they’re busy, busy, busy,” said Wayne N. Outten of Outten & Golden, a New York employment law firm representing the Eos employees. “We have filed somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 Warn Act cases, two-thirds of those in the last four months.”

Many corporate defendants may not have the funds to pay up even if they are found in violation. If the plaintiffs suing Lehman are successful, for example, they will end up as claimants in bankruptcy court, with probably a small fraction of the amount sought, alongside the company’s other creditors. The Eos plaintiffs stand to receive about $1.7 million, just over half of what their lawyer says they were owed, under a settlement approved by federal bankruptcy court in White Plains on Wednesday.

The number of lawsuits filed under the Warn Act or state versions of it (under New York‘s law, which takes effect Feb. 1, companies must provide 90 days’ notice before a layoff) could multiply quickly. Such suits do not require plaintiffs to wait until the government has a chance to investigate.

Courts and lawmakers have also given employees more options under longstanding antidiscrimination laws. In the fall, Congress modified laws prohibiting discrimination against the disabled, increasing the number of conditions considered disabling.

A critical ruling by the Supreme Court in 2005 augmented protections for older workers. The court stated that a plaintiff in such an discrimination lawsuit need not prove an employer acted intentionally, only that a layoff had a “disparate impact” on older workers. The ruling is important because it can be difficult to find evidence that an employer deliberately singled out one or a group of employees.

Only recently have employment lawyers begun to take advantage of protections afforded by federal law to people caring for family members who are sick. Reductions in force, or RIFs, that affect people who are caregivers may violate one of several federal laws, including a prohibition on sex discrimination.

“There is robust social science evidence that there is serious workplace discrimination against mothers and that in the context of this economic downturn it appears that mothers are encountering lots of what they see as ‘mommy RIFs,’ ” said Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law and director of the Center for WorkLife Law. Ms. Williams added that calls had soared in recent months to a hotline for caregivers who thought discrimination played a role in their layoffs.

Proving discrimination is not easy; much turns on the specific facts of an individual’s case. And while the number of legal arguments available to plaintiffs may have increased, winning in court has actually become more difficult, according to several employment lawyers.

“Interpretations of these laws often make it harder for plaintiffs to prevail,” Mr. Sellers said.

In many instances, employers will offer severance payments only to employees who agree to sign away their right to sue. So recipients of generous severance packages, like people laid off by Wall Street firms, may sit out the litigation fray.

Source:

http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20090105005491&newsLang=en

CA today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire New York-based Orchestria Corporation, a leading provider of data loss prevention (DLP) technology. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

CA will develop and sell Orchestria’s information-centric DLP product in the rapidly growing DLP market. It also plans to transform the way organizations think about DLP, identity management and information security overall. Organizations and auditors need to know who has access to data and what they can do with it at a role or user level. By using Orchestria’s DLP technology with CA identity and access management solutions, organizations will now be able to consolidate and strengthen their security postures by including information-centric policies in the process of centrally managing users and roles, and their access throughout the enterprise.

“With this acquisition, CA will deliver one of the broadest and most advanced information security solutions in the market today and address the demand for a new generation of identity and access management,” said Dave Hansen, corporate senior vice president and general manager, CA Security Management. “We are continuing our aggressive plan to deliver to our customers a comprehensive solution for identity and access management to help meet their security, compliance and privacy needs.”

Orchestria’s DLP technology complements CA’s leading-edge server protection capabilities and helps secure an organization’s information in all states—in motion, at rest or at the endpoint—to help prevent data breaches and support privacy and compliance initiatives. Combined with CA’s identity and access management technology, Orchestria’s DLP solution will help transform identity and access management to a comprehensive information security solution. The combination empowers CA and Orchestria customers to control access to data and set policies on how that data can be used based on a user’s identity and role.

“The integration of CA’s and Orchestria’s people and technologies gives customers and prospects a robust solution to help secure their data,” said Pete Malcolm, founder and chief technology officer, Orchestria. “As the lines between information management and information security blur, the combination with CA offers our joint customers a solution to streamline business-critical security measures.”

Driven largely by government, legal and corporate compliance mandates and privacy concerns, Orchestria’s solution is deployed in more than 33 countries and it analyzes, protects and controls more than 100 million electronic actions every day. It is headquartered in New York City and has development and engineering offices in the United Kingdom. CA expects to retain nearly all of Orchestria’s employees, and the deal is expected to close by the end of the month.

This is the third security-related acquisition CA has made in the past three months as part of its strategy to deliver integrated, end-to-end identity and access management-related technologies for its customers. CA in November acquired Eurekify and in October it acquired IDFocus.

Source:Washington Post

The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House’s electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers.

Federal law requires outgoing White House officials to provide the Archives copies of their records, a cache estimated at more than 300 million messages and 25,000 boxes of documents depicting some of the most sensitive policymaking of the past eight years.

But archivists are uncertain whether the transfer will include all the electronic messages sent and received by the officials, because the administration began trying only in recent months to recover from White House backup tapes hundreds of thousands of e-mails that were reported missing from readily accessible files in 2005.

The risks that the transfer may be incomplete are also pointed up by a continuing legal battle between a coalition of historians and nonprofit groups over access to Vice President Cheney’s records. The coalition is contesting the administration’s assertion in federal court this month that he “alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records” and “how his records will be created, maintained, managed, and disposed,” without outside challenge or judicial review.

Eventual access to the documentary record of the Bush presidency has been eagerly anticipated by historians and journalists because the president and his aides generally have sought to shield from public disclosure many details of their deliberations and interactions with outside groups.

“We are worried,” said Arnita A. Jones, executive director of the American Historical Association, which sued the White House several years ago seeking wider access to presidential records than President Bush had said in a 2001 executive order that he wanted the government to provide. “There is a context that is not reassuring,” she said.

The National Archives and Records Administration is supposed to help monitor the completeness of the historical record but has no enforcement powers over White House records management practices. Speaking of the missing e-mails, Archives’ general counsel Gary M. Stern said in an interview last week that “we hope and expect they all will exist on the system or be recoverable,” even in coming weeks. “We can’t say for sure.”

White House spokesman Scott M. Stanzel said last week that “we are making significant progress in accounting for the e-mail records stored on our computer network.” But he declined to say how many e-mails remain missing or to predict how long the recovery will take because the issue is the subject of ongoing litigation.

The National Security Archive, a historical research group, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government, a nonprofit watchdog organization, filed lawsuits in September 2007 to compel the White House to preserve backup e-mail tapes. In November 2007, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. ordered White House officials to preserve such tapes and “not transfer said media out of their custody or control without leave of this court.”

In the case of the vice president’s records, the White House has promised a different federal judge that it will comply with a Nixon-era law requiring the preservation and transfer of all documents related to the vice president’s official duties, but the coalition has drafted a filing for the court on Monday that accuses Cheney of subtly seeking to circumscribe the legal definition of what those official duties encompass to such a degree that he will be able to take home or destroy countless documents related to policymaking that historians want to see.

Anne Weisman, the counsel for the plaintiffs, called Cheney’s assertion that only those records related to tasks specially assigned by Bush need to be preserved “a loophole . . . large enough to drive truckloads of documents through.” It means, she said, that Cheney would not have to surrender documents related to legislation or “advice he gives the president on his own initiative and the influence he has over the president’s decisions.”

The scramble to find missing e-mails and copy them in a digital form that the Archives can comprehend amounts to a replay of the confusion that capped the transfer of President Bill Clinton’s records at the end of his administration in 2001. Then, a series of defects in the White House e-mail archiving system led to congressional subpoenas and the administration’s expenditure of $12 million to recover hundreds of missing e-mails from backup tapes. The effort was not completed until after Clinton left office.

Stanzel said the White House is also still “working to acquire” e-mails involving official government business that were transmitted by presidential aides through accounts operated by the Republican National Committee, a problem also first publicized almost three years ago. “We continue to be in communication with RNC officials about recovering official records,” he said without offering details. Such records are subject to the Presidential Records Act, which requires their transfer to the Archives at noon on Jan. 20.

Thomas S. Blanton, the National Security Archive director, said controversy surrounding the last-minute handling of e-mails by retiring presidents — including intervention by the courts — is hardly exceptional.

Blanton wrote in a 1995 book that Ronald Reagan tried to order the erasure of all electronic backup tapes during his final week in office; the current president’s father struck a secret deal with the U.S. archivist shortly before midnight on his final day in office to seal White House e-mails and take them with him to Texas; and Clinton asserted in 1994 that the National Security Council was not an agency of the government so he could keep its e-mails beyond public reach.

Blanton said last week that “the situation is exponentially worse” under the current administration because the volume of electronic records at stake from Bush’s tenure is higher than in previous administrations. If some of the records are manipulated, even for a short while, he said, “the problem and the cost to the taxpayers is going to be exponentially worse, [as well as] the delay and the lag time before journalists and historians are going to be able to see this.”

The transfer of some White House records officially got under way a few weeks ago with the first air shipments of documents to a leased warehouse north of Dallas, near the projected site of the Bush library, and the transport by truck of some digital records to a remote Navy research center in the mountains of West Virginia. The bullhorn used by Bush at the World Trade Center site in New York is among the objects set to go to Texas.

At the Navy base, all the electronic data are supposed to be “ingested” by a new electronic system meant to allow such efficient cataloguing, indexing and searching that millions of documents can eventually be provided to researchers and citizens online.

The system, which has been under development for a decade by Lockheed Martin and other contractors at a cost of $67.5 million, will rely on software created after the collapse of Enron, when that company’s creditors demanded new tools for quickly sorting its e-mail trove to find damaging information.

But there are obstacles to gaining such ready access to files created by Bush and his appointees. Technical troubles, cost overruns and inadequate funding caused the system to be sharply scaled back at the outset, according to Archives officials and the Government Accountability Office. The result is that it will take years of work — and an additional $70 million — to put in place the features that the Archives initially sought.

“The ingestion of Bush data has just begun,” said Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper, adding that she is unsure how smoothly it has gone.

The Archives hopes to finish much of its work on the new archival system by 2013, when by law the Bush White House records can begin to be accessed under the Freedom of Information Act.

But Archivist Allen Weinstein and other officials say they may still face a serious shortage of trained staff: Out of the Archives’ 3,000 employees at 40 facilities, only a few are assigned to process requests by historians, citizens and others — 10 at the Reagan library, eight at the first Bush library and 10 at the Clinton library.

The result has been a steady growth in delays for processing data requests, from a wait of a year and a half in 2001 at the Reagan library to a current wait of six and a half years. The new Bush library is slated to have 18 archivists.

“I tried — half-whimsically — to ban the word ‘backlog’ in favor of discussing NARA’s ’surplus’ of documents, which sounds better but which remains today an intractable problem,” Weinstein said in a recent speech.

Source:  http://www.macworld.com/article/137017/emailpolicy.html

Apple has sold enterprise-class storage hardware and software for years, but the company has yet to embrace systematic e-mail and document retention policies that are common among publicly traded companies.

According to a recent legal filing (page 7) in the Psystar vs Apple antitrust case, Apple employees are responsible for maintaining their own documents such as e-mails, memos, and voicemails. In other words, there is no company-wide policy for archiving, saving, or deleting these documents

This could pose a problem in the event of a lawsuit. In recent years, companies have been fined millions after failing to retrieve old emails and other files required as evidence. The fear of fines and other sanctions has resulted in many companies instituting strict “e-discovery” retention policies, and has helped give rise to a new class of enterprise-class storage and indexing tools.

An e-discovery lawyer, who asked not to be named because his employer (a firm you probably have heard of) doesn’t want him speaking to the press, explained the basic legal requirements surrounding email and document retention to The Standard. “If litigation is anticipated, the party has a duty to preserve potentially relevant documents,” he said.

“An employee retention program with no organization or coordination is effectively incapable of compliance,” he continued, “barring an act of God, or luck akin to picking every game right in an NCAA pool. Apple’s retention policy is negligent.”

Consider this scenario: Employees could have e-mails from five years ago that become “potentially relevant”, but because there was no policy in place regarding e-documents, those records could easily become destroyed—making it potentially impossible for a plaintiff to make a case from internal documents.

However, Apple claims in the Psystar document that its policy is fine because once the company anticipated litigation:

[Apple] identified a group of employees who could potentially have documents relevant to the issues reasonably evident in this action. Apple then provided those individuals with a document retention notice which included a request for the retention of any relevant documents.

Psystar’s antitrust claim has been dismissed, but Apple is currently involved in many other cases. Apple’s weak e-discovery practices could very well come back to haunt the company.

If you’re interested in learning more about e-discovery, the relevant court case for e-document retention is Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC. LexisNexis gives a nice overview of what is legally required from a corporation.

For even more information, The Sedona Conference recently issued a series of guidelines which, while not legally required, are a good “best practices” guide to document preservation.