Time to Get Paranoid About E-Discovery

DALLAS -- Storage Networking World -- More companies than ever before need to start thinking about how to lay hands on emails in the event of a legal dispute.

This was the chilling message from speakers here yesterday during a presentation of the Wikibon user group.

"Plaintiffs' attorneys would rather litigate your business process than the merits of the case," said Michael McCreary, senior director of the legal business technology division at Pfizer, who took part in yesterday's presentation.

While pharmaceutical and financial firms, among the most regulated and litigious industries, are blazing an e-discovery trail, other sectors, such as construction, manufacturing, entertainment, and retail, are lagging far behind, according to David Vellante, co-founder and lead storage analyst at Wikibon. "Retail are cheap because they work on such thin margins -- they are only just doing disaster recovery."

Size isn't a factor in how savvy -- or ignorant -- a company may be on the issue, said Vellante. "Even within the Fortune 500, they are not even halfway there," he told Byte and Switch. "I think that this is a 10-year challenge for firms."Recent events, however, may force a change in this thinking. Vellante highlighted the recall of some Chinese-made toys by U.S. companies and the recent controversy about the mercury levels in fish as the types of situations that could easily lend themselves to a major e-discovery project.

Further, big-name firms such as Intel and Morgan Stanley have already hit the headlines for shortcomings in their record retention procedures.

The lawyers aren't letting up. According to McCreary, the strategy of following the email trail is becoming entrenched. "More attorneys are looking for who knew what when," he said. "If attorneys can discredit your business process, then they can discredit your organization in the courts."

Corporate America, beware.