Infrastructures of potentially dozens of servers have built up around corporate email systems to provide better governance, reduced risk and improved legislative compliance - anti-virus, anti-spam, attachment handling, encryption, disclaimers, archiving and hot-standby mail servers to name a few.
These disparate email environments provide a fragmented approach to applying email policy and lack overall visibility of email threats. This traditional approach also impacts the quality of the evidence that can be provided by creating barriers to extracting information quickly and in a relevant format.
A MIMECAST SPONSORED WHITE PAPER
Email AS EVIDENCE
12 steps to ensuring good evidential quality of email
Today's litigious and regulatory environments mean organizations are obligated to electronically store information to support discovery and disclosure requests. Organizations that archive email in a 'fractured' environment risk losing control and may struggle to produce evidential-quality email evidence. CONTENTS
Audience and remit 2
Mimecast foreword 3
Executive summary 4
The legal obligation to give disclosure of electronic documents 5
Fragmented email environments 8
Authenticity in a fractured environment 11
Litigation that is commonly concerned with email 13
12 steps to ensuring good evidential quality of email 14
Audience and remit
The intended audience for this White Paper includes corporate counsel, IT management, compliance managers and others concerned with the management of email, although legal experience and knowledge is not assumed. The remit is the writer's experiences as a litigator and advocate.
The author
Stewart Room is a partner at European law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP, where he specializes in the contentious aspects of privacy, information and technology law. He is dual-qualified as barrister and solicitor, with over 16 years' experience as a litigator and advocate. He is the President of the National Association of Data Protection Officers, author of 'Data Protection and Compliance in Context' (2006), 'Email: Law, Practice and Compliance' (2008) and is rated as a leader in the field of data protection and privacy by the legal directory Chambers UK. His clients include BP, BBC, Marks & Spencer, Nestle, RSA, Symantec and Unicef.Mimecast Foreword - Email as evidence
Dr James Blake, Chief Product Strategist
Infrastructures of potentially dozens of servers have built up around corporate email systems to provide better governance, reduced risk and improved legislative compliance - anti-virus, anti-spam, attachment handling, encryption, disclaimers, archiving and hot-standby mail servers to name a few.
These disparate email environments provide a fragmented approach to applying email policy and lack overall visibility of email threats. This traditional approach also impacts the quality of the evidence that can be provided by creating barriers to extracting information quickly and in a relevant format.
Mimecast's approach has always been to build a single web-based email management platform, rather than creating standalone technologies and attempt to integrate them. The entire Mimecast service abstracts the user from the underlying technologies involved and instead provides a service that offers strong chains-of-custody, constant availability, sub-second discovery and an infinite storage capability.
3Executive Summary
Litigants in this country are required by law to give disclosure of electronic documents. This process is often called 'e-discovery'. The obligations are found in the Civil Procedures Rules (CPR). Litigants that fail to give proper disclosure are exposed to serious sanctions.
The law takes disclosure seriously because it is one of the cornerstones of civil justice systems. The law generally prefers a 'cards-up' approach to the resolution of disputes, albeit with exceptions. However, while the spirit and intention of the rules cannot be derided, the fact remains that the process of e-discovery can be an onerous obligation, particularly where the litigant and the lawyer are working in a 'fractured' environment and particularly where emails are involved.
The nature of a 'fractured' environment is one where electronic documents are not properly managed resulting in a loss of control. A fractured environment causes electronic documents to be used and stored erratically, the provenance of electronic documents might be unclear, rules on retention and deletion might be user-defined rather than organization-defined, and there might be problems of considerable duplication.
A fractured environment is detrimental to electronic documents and if litigation touches such an environment the e-discovery process is inevitably more complex, more time-consuming and more expensive than in cases affecting organizations with properly managed data systems. Moreover, the litigation may be less efficient, in the sense that importan... [download for more]
