A recent ABA newsletter has an important article that discusses recent case law surrounding rules for ESI preservation and makes recommendations for changes that effectively extends the retention periods for all ESI.
From: ”A New Set of Rules for e-Discovery Duties and Sanctions” By Nick Brestoff, Published in : EDDE Journal: WINTER 2011 VOLUME 2 Issue 1 — A Publication of the E-Discovery and Digital Evidence Committee ABA Section of Science & Technology Law
“All ESI preserved in accordance with the Preservation Duty shall not be destroyed or materially altered until four years after the Proceeding is final. If such ESI is not then subject to any other Preservation Duty, it may be destroyed. However, if such ESI is subject to a Preservation Duty arising from any other Proceeding, that ESI shall not be destroyed or altered until one year after all such Proceedings are final.”
Juxtaposed Forces:
The impact is interesting in that it is getting harder and harder to delete information and data out of the datacenter. On one hand we have IT’s cost-driven movement to incorporate capacity optimization in the datacenter and on the other legal and regulatory governance that extends retention periods and makes it harder to delete expired information and data – driving up costs and energy consumption. In the preservation world, we are concerned with both, and the paradox of moving towards storage of preservation objects which are larger in size and not dedupe capable is causing capacity growth angst because you must have 3-4 copies of each object distributed for recovery, access, and business continuity.
Thoughts:
- What screams at me is “classification, classification, classification!”
- And, “deletion” as soon as possible – but without order and organization of information throughout the enterprise that is hopeless.
- How to deal with the load, the cost, the complexity – I only see one path. It is the practice approach provided by ILM2.0 . (for more go to www.ilm20.org)
Are there others?