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I imagine it looks better at discovery time to say 'oh sorry we lost these emails because we ran out of disk space' rather than 'we deleted them because we didn
by chubs 6y ago
I imagine it looks better at discovery time to say 'oh sorry we lost these emails because we ran out of disk space' rather than 'we deleted them because we didn't want you to read them'.
- not2b 6y agoNo, companies need to be able to point to an official retention policy that says in writing that emails older then x months or years get deleted. Most do (including my employer), and it's because of legal discovery. But it feels like we're lobotomizing ourselves, as often the reason some odd thing was done was based on a long-deleted email discussion.
- bluedino 6y agoAnd the right way to do it is with an archiving service/appliance
- dahdum 6y agoArchiving is likely solving the wrong problem, for legal reasons they don’t want those old emails hanging around.
- MereInterest 6y agoSounds like the retention policy is also solving the wrong problem. If for legal reasons you want to destroy any potential evidence, maybe it's a good idea to stop doing illegal actions.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoIt's not necessarily illegal actions, just those that would look bad in discovery. Lawyers (as always) tend to err on the side of caution.
- anitil 6y agoI remember Matt Levine talking about how regulators would often find emails along the line of "Let's sell this crap to those idiots" and use that as leverage to force settlements rather than showing actual violation of regulations. The reason being that it's hard to show intent to defraud, and much easier to threaten bad press.
- not2b 6y agoThanks to patents, everyone in technology is doing "illegal actions" all the time, since you can't do anything without infringing hundreds of patents. And if you can find an email somewhere indicating that someone knows that a competitor has feature X, or knows about the existence of a patent, viola, evidence of knowing infringement! Triple damages under US law.