Saving Too Many Emails and Files Is Bad

While email is an indispensable component of running most business, and the use of files is a cornerstone of most organizations’ decision-making, there is a dark cloud to this silver lining of productivity. Over a period of months, years and decades, this electronic information accumulates, creating a new set of costs, risks and challenges. While many companies still have large stores of paper documents, business is increasingly conducted through electronic media. According to a study from UC Berkeley, more than 96% of all information in an enterprise is in digital format, and even 70% of all paper documents are copies of electronic documents.

Left unmanaged, e-mail and files tend to accumulate and consume data storage space. Traditionally organizations attempted to address this by imposing mailbox “quotas” for email, and storage quotas on centralized file servers, limiting the amount of e-mail or files any single user can store in the server.

Within a typical e-mail server, the messages – headers, dates and message text – only consume 4% of the storage space. Attachments to e-mails take up the remaining 96%. Most organizations have migrated or are migrating their email and file storage to cloud-based systems. These systems tend to include a per-user storage quota, but when this quota is exceeded – often only after a few years – the organization pays additional fees for the increase space.

Accumulation and over-retention of email is a risk during litigation. According to a report published by Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, discovery still can represent more than 50% of the costs of litigation. Much of the discovery is around e-mail. In the words of one class-action litigator: “We always go after the e-mail first. It invariably has the best information.” Much of the costs of discovery are incurred from searching through emails and files.

A number of global privacy rules mandate the identification, control, and deletion of personal information. These rules strictly limit how long personal information can be retained. Many companies focus their privacy compliance efforts on applications and structured data in database systems, with little focus on the over retention of emails and their attached files.

Nevertheless, emails and files can and do contain in the aggregate a significant amount of Personal Information (PI). Email can include employees’ or customers’ personal information. Files can contain extracts from databases that can contain significant amount of PI. Privacy rules apply equally to emails, files, and structured data applications. Simply because an email may be harder to search or delete does not relieve a company from applying the appropriate rules.

There’s a final pain point with over-retention: employee productivity. A percentage of emails and files does have business value and should be retained for future access. However, over-retention makes searching for and identifying this business value difficult. Specifically, the small percentage of higher-value information quickly gets lost in the clutter of over-retention.

New employees will re-create existing documents either because they don’t know someone else already wrote it or they can’t find it. Employees will update or edit the wrong version of a document. And while not necessarily an over-retention issues, as an employee retires and even though his old files are stored somewhere, his successor does not have access to that information, making it effectively lost. These are powerful, real inhibitors driven by over retention that decrease employee productivity and collaboration.

More information on defensible disposition is available at Contoral.