Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 9:50 AM
Posted by Bill Kee, Product MarketingHere at Google Enterprise, one thing we focus on is making the web-based applications that people use at home more suitable for the workplace. This often means providing administrative or specialized security features to meet the specific challenges faced by organizations. One challenge that organizations face is legal discovery of electronically stored information, particularly email. Several factors have conspired to make this process, known as "e-discovery," difficult and costly.
Foremost are the growth in volume of electronically stored information (think at least 1GB of email per employee per year) and changes to rules that guide the discovery process (pdf), which have set new expectations for how companies should treat electronic information during the course of a lawsuit. As a result, many organizations find themselves scrambling to locate and preserve email in response to impending litigation, often spending excessively in the course of doing so. Given the complexity involved, it can cost $1,800 to shepherd a gigabyte of email through the discovery process.
There are things you can do, however, to transform e-discovery from a fire drill into a predictable business process. A good start is to be proactive about email archiving to ensure that a comprehensive and centralized record of all email is maintained and accessible to administrators. Setting policies regarding the retention of email is also a good idea. It's with this in mind that we've included an email archiving application with Google Apps Premier Edition (also available for non-Google Apps customers). It's also useful to understand how email archiving fits into the rest of the e-discovery process; a good framework for approaching this can be found in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM).
To learn more about e-discovery, the EDRM, and steps you can take to be proactive, join us for a free webinar we're holding on June 3 with Clearwell Systems, a technology company focusing on e-discovery.

