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Records Management: $20 Million a Pop
When a mega-software company like Microsoft gets involved in litigation that involves the eDiscovery process of researching email and company documents, the average cost works out to be about $20 million. And these cases aren’t isolated incidents. They happen regularly — Microsoft has an on-going backlog of cases that they’re researching.
Microsoft’s Records Management analysis manager was quoted as saying that any money spent to help improve the eDiscovery process is well worth it. And a corollary to this is that a solid foundation for Records Management is essential to be able to cost-effectively respond to eDiscovery investigations.
At Microsoft, it has even become routine for performance and self-assessment reviews of managers to include effective Records Management as a task. Maybe there was some self interest at Microsoft with the work that they’ve recently done to beef up Records Management capabilities in their MOSS 2007 release.
It’s important for companies to first define the process and, equally importantly, to then follow up and enforce the implementation and compliance with the policy within the organization. That clearly isn’t what happened at Arthur Andersen. There a complex 650-page document retention policy was created in 1998, but Arthur Andersen was later found guilty of not complying with parts of that policy, which ultimately caused the company to collapse.
Effective Records Management is vital for companies to quickly and cost-effectively respond to eDiscovery inquiries.
