EDD: Issues, Law, and Solutions: 60 BILLION emails daily and counting

Thursday, January 15, 2009

60 BILLION emails daily and counting

I hate email!

There... I said it!

Email is an albatross around all of our necks. Studies show that 60 billion emails are sent daily and it seems that half of them end up in my inbox.

For a little perspective - When I started Superior Document Services in 1998, Superior had an AOL email account. That's right ONE email account for the entire company : legalcopyr@aol.com accessed thought a dial up modem. OUCH!

In those days I might average 1 email a day from a client. ONE! My inbox today has 8085 items in it and that is with a liberal delete policy.

As I struggle to maintain control over my ever expanding universe of emails I realize that all email is not created equal. There is lots of important information trapped inside of the emails and using Outlook alone isn't cutting it. Newsletters, status updates, and confirmation emails shouldn't carry the same weight as an email from your largest client.

My visionary and inspirational friend Daniel Waldschmidt showed me an excellant tool for Outlook \: XOBNI.
Thats INBOX backwards. Xobni (price = free) gives you specialized dashboards that spotlight crucial data about your inbox and contacts - information often buried and ignored. For example not only does it show me a contacts phone number; Xobni groups conversations; files shared and common contacts in an easy to access format.

As result of my love for XOBNI I started doing a bit more research and found "clearcontext". This free application offers the best bang for the download I have seen. Featuring smart functions that group related emails together ( like gmail has for years) so you can follow a conversation. It sees who you reply to and how often and color codes and prioritizes their messages; graying out mass emails. While this sounds like a little thing; distinguishing between boilerplate notifications and emails that may generate business dollars at a glance is a wonderful innovation.

The last tool I found but haven't tried seems to be the holy grail of value adds to Outlook is called Gist. This free application; still in beta, searches news feeds for information about people you email. For example; if one of my clients gets promoted to partner at his prestigious AMLAW 100 firm , the news pops up on my dashboard as soon as it is made public and allows me to fire off a personal note in a timely manner. For someone having 9000 emails from places as disparate as Honk Kong; Munich, Houston and Kingston Jamiaca, this tool has limitless potential. I have heard great things about this software and will fill in the blanks as soon as I am fully versed. HInt Hint Gist folks....

While it may seem that you are drowning in emails, there are tools available to help. I hope you will find these valuable.

Additional suggestions are more than welcome.

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Sedona Principles 2nd ed.

1. Electronically stored information is potentially discoverable under Fed. R. Civ. P. 34 or its state equivalents. Organizations must properly preserve electronically stored information that can reasonably be anticipated to be relevant to litigation.
2. When balancing the cost, burden, and need for electronically stored information, courts and parties should apply the proportionality standard embodied in Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(2)(C) and its state equivalents, which require consideration of the technological feasibility and realistic costs of preserving, retrieving, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information, as well as the nature of the litigation and the amount in controversy.
3. Parties should confer early in discovery regarding the preservation and production of electronically stored information when these matters are at issue in the litigation and seek to agree on the scope of each party’s rights and responsibilities.
4. Discovery requests for electronically stored information should be as clear as possible, while responses and objections to discovery should disclose the scope and limits of the production.
5. The obligation to preserve electronically stored information requires reasonable and good faith efforts to retain information that may be relevant to pending or threatened litigation. However, it is unreasonable to expect parties to take every conceivable step to preserve all potentially relevant electronically stored information.
6. Responding parties are best situated to evaluate the procedures, methodologies, and technologies appropriate for preserving and producing their own electronically stored information.
7. The requesting party has the burden on a motion to compel to show that the responding party’s steps to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information were inadequate.
8. The primary source of electronically stored information for production should be active data and information. Resort to disaster recovery backup tapes and other sources of electronically stored information that are not reasonably accessible requires the requesting party to demonstrate need and relevance that outweigh the costs and burdens of retrieving and processing the electronically stored information from such sources, including the disruption of business and information management activities.
9. Absent a showing of special need and relevance, a responding party should not be required to preserve, review, or produce deleted, shadowed, fragmented, or residual electronically stored information.
10. A responding party should follow reasonable procedures to protect privileges and objections in connection with the production of electronically stored information.
11. A responding party may satisfy its good faith obligation to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information by using electronic tools and processes, such as data sampling, searching, or the use of selection criteria, to identify data reasonably likely to contain relevant information.
12. Absent party agreement or court order specifying the form or forms of production, production should be made in the form or forms in which the information is ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form, taking into account the need to produce reasonably accessible metadata that will enable the receiving party to have the same ability to access, search, and display the information as the producing party where appropriate or necessary in light of the nature of the information and the needs of the case.
13. Absent a specific objection, party agreement or court order, the reasonable costs of retrieving and reviewing electronically stored information should be borne by the responding party, unless the information sought is not reasonably available to the responding party in the ordinary course of business. If the information sought is not reasonably available to the responding party in the ordinary course of business, then, absent special circumstances, the costs of retrieving and reviewing such electronic information may be shared by or shifted to the requesting party.
14. Sanctions, including spoliation ﬁndings, should be considered by the court only if it finds that there was a clear duty to preserve, a culpable failure to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information, and a reasonable probability that the loss of the evidence has materially prejudiced the adverse party.
Copyright © 2007 The Sedona Conference®. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted courtesy of The Sedona Conference®.
Go to http://www.thesedonaconference.org/ to download a free copy of the complete document for your personal use only.