Lora Bentley spoke with Marie-Charlotte Patterson, VP of marketing for AXS One. Patterson shared examples of the circumstances under which two companies have finally decided to take the next step in managing their electronic records. These were the "straws that broke the camel's back" for these companies, she says.

Bentley: I'm sure you've heard some records management nightmare stories. Are there any that particularly stand out in your mind, maybe some that could serve as cautionary tales for our readers?

Patterson: Given that they’ve been customers for some time, their volumes may seem small compared to what organizations are dealing with now.

Bentley: That's fine.
Patterson: One is in financial services, so it's regulated, and its representatives told us their securities trading desk had stopped deleting e-mail altogether in an attempt to comply with SEC and NASD rules about electronic communication. This was a difficult “mea culpa” for the IT team to accept because it was struggling to keep its head above water. HR, internal audit, fraud prevention, information security, employee retention, legal and all kinds of other groups had been asking for access to e-mail with increasing frequency.

Bentley: OK

Patterson: At one point they literally destroyed a printer printing out more than 18 gigabytes of e-mail that was to be produced as evidence in a legal case. Shortly after they shipped the first 15 reams of paper to an outside law firm for review, the case settled. The first legal case really frightened them into thinking about what would happen if they got requests to produce e-mail like this on a regular basis.

Bentley: I’m sure it did.
Patterson: Then requests started coming in from their HR department, which proved their worst nightmare. So they began touring through the company meeting with all the different groups to gather requirements for the technology they would need.

Bentley: And the second?

Patterson: The second example comes from a company in health care. That company’s big issue was litigation – particularly the requirements resulting from the amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in December 2006 regarding electronic records.

Bentley: Right.
Patterson: A gentleman from this company who was a member of our customer advisory board at the time said that, given the type of business this company is in, there are dozens if not hundreds of cases going on at any one time. In one particular case, the e-discovery requirement was for all records, from 23 custodians over seven years, and that was for all electronically stored information. It wasn’t just for a particular record type.

Bentley: What did they do?
Patterson: They’d already received a quote. They were keeping things on backup tapes, and the cost of going through the tapes and so forth was going to be in the order of $1 million. Thankfully for them, they hadn’t actually signed the piece of paper to say, “Yes, go ahead and do the work” when they received an order that the number of custodians subject to discovery had increased from 23 to 42.

Bentley: That's not good.
Patterson: Had they already gone through the first search, they would then have paid $1 million yet again to go through exactly the same set of tapes with broader requirements. In addition, prior to the e-discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, they’d also lost a judgment of more than $100 million, and part of the reason was that they were unable to provide information in a timely manner. So for them it was really the cost of discovery that made them reconsider how they were managing their electronic records.