InsideTech » November 2007
The Easy Button
This month legal technology expert Brett Burney discusses solutions that help in-house counsel retrieve and analyze e-mail.
General counsel are called upon to police and supervise an ever-broadening scope of electronic risks found in today's corporate environment. One of the most dangerous fissures exists within employee e-mail.
People will say in an e-mail what they’d never say in person or over the phone. This presents a monumental risk. Epic litigation strategies can be utterly destroyed by a few frisky words found in an ill-conceived e-mail.
General counsel can't be expected to walk the halls like a grade-school teacher, constantly reminding employees to watch what they say. And employees can only swallow so many training classes before they start to revolt. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an "easy button" you could push to gather employee e-mail for every compliance audit and litigation matter that comes across your desk without having to involve your overworked IT department?
Fortunately, there are some companies that are providing tools to help you proactively search, retrieve and preserve relevant employee e-mail along with attachments and other communications. The following is merely a sample of some of these "one-button" remedies.
- AXSOne (pronounced "access one") has deep roots in data archiving. It’s been helping large corporations retain records in electronic form for compliance purposes for almost 15 years. Archiving e-mails has become a natural extension of its technology.
In the past, AXSOne met with IT staff at large corporations, working with them to integrate an archiving workflow into the corporate information systems. Lately, AXSOne has found itself at the table with in-house counsel, answering questions on how to search, analyze and review all the corporate data (e-mail, instant messages, etc.) the software has collected.
Richard Hoffman, vice president of development, describes how companies use his solution. First, data is archived, organized and indexed. From there the solution can give in-house counsel the ability to search the archive for specific messages or e-mails relevant to a discovery request. In addition the solution allows automatic destruction policies to continue in place while relevant data is preserved for litigation purposes.
- Founded in 2003 InBoxer focuses on three areas: e-mail archiving, electronic discovery and content monitoring. The company’s solution, Anti-Risk Appliance, may be better suited for general counsel serving small- and medium-sized companies that don’t have the extensive regulatory and compliance requirements that a larger, public company might encounter.
The InBoxer Anti-Risk Appliance connects directly to e-mail servers so it can actively archive and monitor both inbound and outbound e-mail along with attachments. The solution captures and indexes e-mail in real time so that general counsel can preview e-mail within minutes.
Founder and CEO Roger Matus states that his solution appeals to GCs because it helps them prevent internal disputes from exploding into public lawsuits. Matus says InBoxer helps in-house counsel answer the question "Do I have a problem?" or, more specifically, "Did Bob send a harassing e-mail to Betty?"
In addition InBoxer set up a Web site at www.enronemail.com where visitors are free to test the InBoxer software against hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages collected during the Enron litigation.
- Clearwell Systems, which focuses on the review and analysis side of the equation, views itself as being complementary to e-mail archiving systems such as EMC and Symantec, which may already be in place at your company.
President and CEO Aaref Hilaly explains that archiving is only 50 percent of the equation. Once your IT department collects and archives the data, the legal department can then use the Clearwell Intelligence Platform to "cull-down," search and analyze e-mail messages, attachments and loose files. For example, Clearwell can visually outline an e-mail "thread" so you can easily trace replies, forwards and investigate the entire discussion.
- Lastly, a smaller company called Estorian provides a service similar to Clearwell’s. Vice president of strategy and channel operations Bob Richter describes the company’s LookingGlass system as more of a compliance tool than an archiving solution. Once an e-discovery matter identifies an issue within a company, Richter insists that LookingGlass will help make sure such a situation never happens again. Michael Kelly, director of business development, describes LookingGlass as a way for general counsel to easily discover how their employees are interacting both internally and with the outside world. The overall goal is to limit the company's risk exposure.
Brett Burney is Principal of Burney Consultants LLC, and focuses his time on bridging the chasm between the legal and technology frontiers of electronic discovery. You can visit his Web site at http://www.burneyconsultants.com and email him at burney@burneyconsultants.com.
