Federal Evidentiary Rule-Change Creates Records Management Challenge For Corporate Attorneys

By Tom Utiger, President, Data Empowerment Group

The Federal courts initiated sweeping new evidentiary rules governing discoverable corporate records, including rules that consider even routine voice-mail messages as corporate "records." These are rules that all but mandate that plaintiffs have workable, consistent records management policies, along with a system that allows those rules to be implemented.

This new Federal mandate requires:

• A pre-discovery meeting in which contending parties have to demonstrate their records management policy – at this meeting, the lack of such a policy could have dire legal consequences
• This corporate policy must present a rational way of managing, retaining and discarding documents – including documents held by outside attorneys, CPAs and others who create documents FOR the company that belong TO the company
• This policy must recognize that every email is a document – a record – and, along with other corporate records, emails can't just be discarded, not without a policy for managing the retention and destruction of records