1 Management and Retention Dick Jensen Director, Information Technology Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP Toronto, Ontario, Canada

2 Agenda The Evolution of The Adolescent Years What are the Issues Retention vs. Destruction Archiving Records Management vs. Management Laws Governing Retention Crystal Ball Conclusion Open Discussion

3 Our attorneys are drowning in a barrage of messages. The flood is not going to stop, and the amount of messages will continue to get deeper. We, in the technology field, do not have the power to stop the downpour and we must determine how we are going to build the boats to save our attorneys from drowning. Management and Retention

4 The Evolution of Began as a disposable medium Casual communication Now treated similar to a memo or document

5 The Adolescent Years Late 90s: displacing Fax and paper-based mail delivery A typical user handles messages per day A typical 3,000-user system handles over one terabyte of traffic annually

6 The Adolescent Years – continued The typical Exchange message store, assuming messages are not deleted, fills up in less than 27 days According to Gartner Group, 80% of an organization's knowledge is buried in the thousands of s pulsing through the corporate Ethernet on a daily basis Server backups taking far too long

7 What are the Issues Quantity of messages Spam, Viruses Faxes arriving via Blackberry Units Unified Messaging Media – Video Clips Scanned Images

8 What are the Issues – continued Restoration considerations –How long would it take to rebuild your server and restore the data –Firms feel crippled when they loose access to their , calendar, contacts –Painfully slow and laborious to build a second server, perform a restore from tape in order to get back some deleted for an attorney

9 What are the Issues - continued Typical storage locations –Outlook PST – Corruption, difficult to manage and search –Document Management Systems – Manual user involvement –File System cumbersome for the user and they only do it when they have time

10 Retention vs. Destruction Why retain ? –Important history of my practice –Searchable when online –Data contributes to our Knowledge Management initiative –A user may not know that a message they send could turn out to be a key piece of evidence in a case –Ability to demonstrate, in court, that your firm practices a documented and firm-wide policy of retaining all communications

11 Retention vs. Destruction - continued Why retain ? –What about the risk of a smoking-gun being found it is more likely that you will find key information that will help your case rather than hurt it –Robert Eisenberg, National Law Journal –manage the risk, dont eliminate it Purge the junk mail first Delete non-important messages Manually file client correspondence

12 Retention vs. Destruction - continued Shredders –online services that encrypt and destroy the keys after a period of time –messages are not actually deleted and only the encryption keys are removed –a Forensic record can be established that there was a message (sender, receiver, date, time) can never really be destroyed –messages traverse intermediary computers –recipients can retain and forward messages

13 Archiving Server level, set it and forget it Rules-based system to allow for different types of users –leave more data in mailbox for road warriors Ability to respond to discovery requests much more quickly and at a greatly reduced cost

14 Archiving – continued Ability to search all folders with one search –contents of attachments, all folders including custom folders Automatically inherit mailbox user rights –assistants generally have access to some information in their attorneys mailbox Access to archive remotely via standard remote access products Can be implemented with minimal user training

15 Records Management vs. Management What is the difference? –The records management discipline is a well documented set of procedures and systems to preserve records for predetermined periods of time based on their value What is a record? –Related to business function of legal obligation –Recorded in some useable form –Authentic and reliable

16 Laws Governing Retention There are few, if any, laws that deal directly with E- Mail. There are cases where courts are starting to treat as normal business documents

17 Crystal Ball Use your archive system as a backup tool so that a single message can be easily recovered by the user themselves Comb your data repository as part of your Knowledge management initiative

18 Conclusion There are numerous tools to assist with building the boats to save our attorneys from the flood. You need to evaluate what kind of boat your firm needs and choose a company who can build it for you

19 Management and Retention Dick Jensen Director, Information Technology Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP Toronto, Ontario, Canada