You've been hearing for years that you have to prepare your records so that in the event of a legal or regulatory discovery, you have your records in order. Well, to drive the point home, CNET News reports that a federal judge has issued a harsh rebuke against Oracle for its failure to produce key emails from CEO Larry Ellison as part of a lawsuit filed by shareholders against the software giant in 2001. The judge minced no words when she said, "Oracle destroyed or failed to preserve Chief Executive Larry Ellison's email files sought as evidence..." Let that be a lesson for everyone reading this.

If you don't track your company's emails, especially from key executives, should you be called upon to do so in legal process, you are still responsible for failing to produce the evidence being sought. You can't hide behind excuses that you have too much email or your dog ate it, or the servers destroyed it. You are legally responsible to produce it. Perhaps that's why purchases such as Interwoven's recent acquisition of Discovery Mining [1] loom so important. Companies need to establish policies and systems, and must purchase the technology to track this information.

If you don't pay attention to this type of archiving, you do so at your own peril, as this case clearly shows.

For more:
- see the full story [2] at CNET News