Corporate Scandals Point to Need to Protect and Preserve Records

Kate Meyers, owner of Brown & Meyers, offers advice to businesses and organizations about protecting vital records

With no end in sight to the wave of corporate scandals – both in Maine and nationally – it’s more important than ever for corporations and organizations to have a system in place to manage, organize and preserve records.’

Interest in records management and regulatory compliance has grown in response to the public’s shrinking faith in major corporations and new stricter legislation that has placed more accountability at the corporate level.
Effective December 1, 2006, the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) required organizations to adapt how they manage, retain, store, and deliver electronically stored information (ESI) during legal proceedings. As a result, all organizations (including Global 2000) that could potentially be under investigation in the U.S. Court systems must understand and comply with the new FRCP immediately. Compliance and IT departments must ensure corporate policies and procedures for document and email retention, eDiscovery readiness, and metadata management comply with FRCP to avoid business loss, monetary fines, and adverse case rulings.

Enterprise search plays a vital role when it comes to enabling effective records management, regulatory compliance and facilitating the associated information access and discovery process. A corporation’s records must not only be searchable, but findable. A comprehensive enterprise search system drastically reduces expenses by enabling records to remain onsite, provides timely and efficient customer service by allowing quick and ready accessibility to documents/e-mail and frees up valuable office space.

A recent lawsuit that rattled the legal services industry illustrates the need for strong electronic records management. A Florida jury had ordered Morgan Stanley to pay investor and Revlon Inc. Chairman Ronald Perelman a stunning $1.58 billion, including punitive damages. The jury sided with Perelman, agreeing that Morgan Stanley defrauded him when he sold camping-gear maker the Coleman Company, Inc. to the former Sunbeam Corp. in 1998. The verdict hinged in part on damaging testimony about e-mail policies, including Morgan Stanley’s failure to produce e-mail records and the firm’s lies about its efforts to do so. The case was later thrown out by the Florida Supreme Court, but the message was clear – corporations need be sure to maintain and store electronic records or else.

The same message applies more locally with the recent uncovering of a scandal at a prominent Maine law firm, Verrill & Dana. With legal proceedings a very real possibility, the production and retention of e-mails and other documents and records will be paramount.

That situation notwithstanding, CIOs at law firms are advised to step up technology efforts concerning e-discovery, or their corporate clients will lose cases – and firms will lose clients and stature.

Here area some guidelines for Federal Rules of Civil Procedure preparation:

• Map out all places where electronic information is stored: Locate any data source, including deleted data, data on systems no longer in use, data in remote or third-party locations, copies of production data used in demos, test systems, etc..
• Update records retention policies to include all electronic information: Corporate retention policies should be applied to email and other electronic records.
• Ensure the litigation hold policy fully covers all electronic information, including backup tapes: Make sure the litigation hold policy document includes rules for all relevant electronic records, such as email, electronic documents, scanned documents and backup tapes.
• Purchase software that simplifies identification, retrieval and production of potentially relevant data. A properly configured and managed archiving system makes production of data in response to an e-discovery order far simpler than if backup tapes must be searched for the same information.
• Establish a Plan of Action: Evaluate how data storage is organized to proactively prepare for electronic discovery requests

Most of the information that employees produce is somehow tied up in e-mail in the form of documents, contacts, e-mail threads and other content. An archiving system allows an organization to preserve this information for long periods so that employees have access to it when necessary.

The implementation of a software-based intelligent archiving platform, such as Computhink’s ViewWise, will store, manage and enable discovery of corporate data from email systems, file server environments, instant messaging platforms and content management and collaboration systems. Because not all data is created equally, ViewWise, for example, utilizes intelligent classification and retention technologies to capture, categorize, index and store target data in order to enforce policies and protect corporate assets while reducing storage costs and simplifying management.

The bottom line is physical records are not going away, while electronic records have added an almost infinite number of documents that need to be maintained and stored. Plus, the stakes for non-compliance with regulations and rules of civil procedure continue to escalate. Applying records management policies consistently across all types of records just makes good business sense and will help avoid pitfalls down the road.

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Kate Meyers-Coyne is the owner and operator of Brown & Meyers, a Portland, Maine-based company that is New England’s leading supplier of high-quality transcription, document management and court reporting services. She can be reached at (207) 772-6732 or kate@brownmeyers.com.