Defense lawyers for the province of British Columbia, in Canada, were left completely speechless and utterly stunned at the discovery that thousands of important emails had been accidentally or mistakenly deleted.

The emails in question consisted of correspondences that occurred between the executive branch and the cabinet during one of the biggest business deals in Canadian history: the sale of BC Rail to CN Rail.
The conversations, which took place between 2001 and 2005, had reportedly been purged while the trial was before the courts.

According to a recent article in The Globe And Mail, this incident leaves a gaping hole in the official record of the deal, and could potentially collapse the case.

This case has the potential to be one of the most expensive ediscovery cases ever in Canada, and should serve as a sobering reminder that nothing can be left to chance when it comes to compliance and data protection.

In the past, the preservation of email has always been seen as the responsibility of the IT department. But as more of these incidents come to light, it’s becoming more apparent that many departments (including HR, finance & legal, etc...) need to be involved in the compliance and retention process.

Also, it’s now more important than ever to establish a fast, dependable and well-organized compliance strategy to protect your company in the event of an ediscovery request such as the one faced by the province. If your company is ever asked to appear before the judge and disclose your business documents, failure to comply can be a very expensive and embarrassing experience.

Of course, email compliance doesn’t have to be this expensive or complicated process. There are a lot of great services out there that can help you maintain your historical email data without implementing any overly-complicated changes to your IT infrastructure or making any significant capital investments.

The important thing to remember is that email compliance is a very specialized field, and your company needs to assign an experienced & knowledgeable specialist to make sure the process is implemented properly.

For anyone reading this within organizations that haven’t given much consideration to their email retention practices, you might want to give this article a read. This could happen to you just as easily as it’s happening to them. Taking decisive action now can prevent your company from becoming another data loss horror story.

About The Author:

Storagepipe Solutions provides email archiving and online backup that helps companies protect themselves from email retention expensive accidents in case of litigation.

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