5 tips to comply with new ediscovery rules
Posted by Deborah on December 11, 2006 in e-Discovery
The new electronic discovery rules are good news for prepared companies. If your company can demonstrate that you have taken reasonable care in creating guidelines as to what information needs to be retained and what should be purged, this will help in a court order since you can prove that your organization has taken electronic record retention seriously and that there are no ‘irregular’ deletions of specific documents or emails.
Follow these 5 tips to show that your organization has taken reasonable care:
1. Develop a records retention policy. Much like an email policy, company management will need to get involved in deciding about which documents need to be retained and when they should be purged.
2. Provide staff training to explain to users why the retention policy is needed and how it should be put into practice. Include retention policy guidelines in your employment handbook.
3. Identify and classify the electronic records that you currently have on your systems. Determine whether these are accessible or inaccessible, and whether some of these records should be deleted. Keep this database up to date.
4. Create an action plan that will be followed if your company faces a court order, in order to immediately inform your employees not to delete certain documents.
5. Keep evidence of the above activities so that you can demonstrate to the court that you showed good faith.
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