A Federal Ruling on electronic discovery requirements took effect December 1, 2006. The e-discovery rule will place more stringent electronic message archiving requirements on Businesses, Schools and Not-For-Profits (for a digestible summary go here). The ruling states that an entity involved in litigation shall be able to produce all relevant electronically stored information–email, IM, etc.–during legal discovery. This means that organizations must store the communications AND be able to retrieve them in a timely fashion. The ruling also states that organizations will not be expected to produce the documents when doing so would result in “undue burden of cost.”
