+1,000 One drawn out litigation is all you need to start a chain of legal holds that end up forcing you to retain email indefinitely. One of the organizations

+1,000 One drawn out litigation is all you need to start a chain of legal holds that end up forcing you to retain email indefinitely. One of the organizations that I'm familiar with is retaining all email sent or received since 1992, due to a series of long-standing lawsuits. If you're retaining email for one litigation, it can and will be used in a subsequent litigation if you have it. But on the other hand, many, if not most email communications are ephemeral in nature. In many large companies and government especially, IM was seen as a toy that kids played with, and was banished from corporate networks. At the same time, they provide NO convenient tools for sharing data and NO ability to search through the limited data storage options available. The result? Employees use email to send IM-like messages, and the mailbox becomes a defacto, uncontrolled, electronic file cabinet. So if you let people take care of ephemeral communications with IM/voice/video, (especially voice/video) you probably improve communications and limit liability. And if you use sharepoint or a similar tool to share stuff, you can setup retention policies, etc to manage those risks.