Comments on: Users rebel against e-Discovery liabilities http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/users-rebel-against-e-discovery-liabilities/ A SearchStorage.com blog. Sun, 27 May 2012 15:43:38 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Craig Chval http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/users-rebel-against-e-discovery-liabilities/#comment-7169 Craig Chval Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:19:42 +0000 http://storage.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/06/19/users-rebel-against-e-discovery-liabilities/#comment-7169 In the strictest sense, of course, no enterprise can foist legal liability onto its IT personnel. Internal finger-pointing, however, is an entirely different proposition. At the end of the day, it will be the enterprise that pays the price, however large or small, for non-compliance and it will be the enterprise attorneys, in-house or outside, who defend the retention practices in court. All retention decisions, whether involving electronic or hard-copy data, must be content-based. Expecting IT personnel to make content-based decisions about electronic data makes no more sense than allowing the night watchman at the off-site records storage facility to decide which boxes of documents to destroy. For too long, retention and deletion practices were left to IT experts by default, as nobody else understood the technology. Understandably, IT experts' usual priorities were system efficiency and storage conservation. Now that there is no question that overburdened storage media are the least of an enterprise's concerns when it comes to data retention and deletion, it is imperative that sound data retention practices meld technical expertise, business concerns and pertinent legal issues. In the strictest sense, of course, no enterprise can foist legal liability onto its IT personnel. Internal finger-pointing, however, is an entirely different proposition. At the end of the day, it will be the enterprise that pays the price, however large or small, for non-compliance and it will be the enterprise attorneys, in-house or outside, who defend the retention practices in court.

All retention decisions, whether involving electronic or hard-copy data, must be content-based. Expecting IT personnel to make content-based decisions about electronic data makes no more sense than allowing the night watchman at the off-site records storage facility to decide which boxes of documents to destroy.

For too long, retention and deletion practices were left to IT experts by default, as nobody else understood the technology. Understandably, IT experts’ usual priorities were system efficiency and storage conservation. Now that there is no question that overburdened storage media are the least of an enterprise’s concerns when it comes to data retention and deletion, it is imperative that sound data retention practices meld technical expertise, business concerns and pertinent legal issues.

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