ABA Banking Journal - June 2008 - (Page 46)

Tech topics Blame it on Martha In some sense, email’s presence in the court is merely a sign of changing business habits and practices. “Today, e-mail is a leading source of documentation about transactions and work flow, and it stands as a key source of transaction commentary and validation,” says eDiscovery expert and attorney Craig Ball. In another sense, the radical rise in the importance of e-mail can be explained directly by “Marthagate,” Enron, and other cases that established precedent in recent years, says ESG’s Babineau. “When e-mail proved to be so useful in court, more attorneys began using it. Now, it’s use has become a norm,” he adds. The ESG analyst says in the months ahead, subprime-related legal matters will force most institutions that lend—regardless of size—to begin rethinking how they handle e-mail. Basically, the “it’s just too hard to manage” excuse won’t hold (as it hasn’t for Wall Street for some time). Stephen Ludlow, senior program manager, eDiscovery solutions at enterprise content management vendor, OpenText, based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, agrees that subprime litigation will be a driver both for more suits and for more types of organizations to adopt e-mail-specific management systems as well as improving their overall recordsmanagement strategies. Not that banks, particularly large ones, haven’t been, in some sense, ready to rumble, prepared for e-mail’s new legal exposures. As part of the general cost of e-mail management and preparedness for eDiscovery, companies generally have to figure out such details as whether to outsource the eDiscovery process, in effect, paying outsiders to search the electronic files in the event of a suit, which is costly. “Leaders in the financial services industry are beginning to take an enterprise management approach and are insourcing,” Ludlow says. By now the most sophisticated of these have effective, reasonable enough, semi-automated sys46 JUNE 2008/ABA BANKING JOURNAL tems in place—a golden triangle involving IT, compliance, and legal experts—working in more coordinated ways to tame this growing, wild info beast. Typically, this effort is part of a larger risk management practice. The ideal system, Austinbased attorney Craig Ball says, produced results whereby an e-mail system is protective of the company on one hand, but capable of producing evidence of key financial transactions that might benefit a client in a legal dispute should one happen. have everything [in terms of e-mails] or you have nothing, then you’ve missed the point.” Should you own your e-mail? But what’s most interesting about e-mail, according to Ball, is its personalized and idiosyncratic nature, making it, in his view, the Wild West of records management. “People tend to manage their e-mail content in distinctive ways. Some are obsessive hoarders, creating storage challenges for their IT staffs; others toss everything after an initial read. Some are category and taxonomy mavens; and others just leave it in a large undifferentiated mass and so on,” Ball observes. “You can have two employees sitting a cubical apart and their record retention ‘policy,’ such as it is, will be very, very different. This sense of personal possession of records is really new to banks and businesses,” says Ball. “I can’t imagine another kind of record or something in a paper file being held onto so personally.” This ownership stake—and the personal, panicked responses that may occur when trouble hits—is at the heart of why e-mail is so hard to get a grip on. But it’s an issue banks need to address. “I’ve seen situations where very good rules engines have been interfered with, effectively widening the scope of retention,” Ball says. “What you want is a clear reason for keeping what is, in fact, kept. An organization needs a consistent practice, and decisions around selective retention shouldn’t be emotionally driven. If you How much technology needed? Unsurprisingly, a whole ecosystem of technologies designed to semi-automate e-mail management has made its way into the marketplace. Some are expressly designed to tackle eDiscovery (or at least wear that label) and others are more general purpose, including enterprise content management systems and related storage technologies, as is the case with Stephen Ludlow’s enterprise content management firm. These include software for e-mail and database archival as well as file system archival software, case management software, solutions for data restoration, and search-and-review software that tracks key words. Stephen Catanzano, president and CEO of SafeCore, a managed services provider based in Medford, Mass., is READER RESOURCES ABA ABA published the ABA Toolbox on Records Management in May. Tool 6 deals specifically with e-mail. ABA Members can find this helpful guide at www.aba.com/members+only/ recordsmgmt_toolbox.htm#RMWkgGrp Enterprise Strategy Group www.enterprisestrategygroup.com Forrester Research, Inc. www.forrester.com Iron Mountain, Inc. www.ironmountain.com Kazeon Systems, Inc. www.kazeon.com Mary Mack’s Sound Evidence Blog www.discoveryresources.org OpenText www.opentext.com SafeCore www.safecore.com Vetting your eDiscovery vendor, a lawyer’s perspective http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/ftr0 7043.html Subscribe at www.ababj.com http://www.safecore.com http://www.opentext.com http://www.aba.com/members only/recordsmgmt_toolbox.htm#RMWkgGrp http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com http://www.forrester.com http://www.ironmountain.com http://www.kazeon.com http://www.discoveryresources.org http://www.opentext.com http://www.safecore.com http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/ftr07043.html http://www.ababj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ABA Banking Journal - June 2008

ABA Banking Journal - June 2008 Contents Editor’s Column Do Fee-based Services Have an Edge? Snapshot: Net Interest Margins Vary Sharply with Size 100th Anniversary: Then & Now Letters ABA Resources ABA Chairman’s Position "What? No Annual Surprise Bonus?" Pass the Aspirin Cover Story: Top Community Banks: How They Did... ...And How They Did It Charter Bank First East Side Savings Bank Mackinac Financial Corp. The Peoples Bank Managing the E-mail Monster In Brief Handling PEPs in the Age of "L'affaire Spitzer" Mailbox Banker’s Mart To Advertise/Index of Advertisers The Economy

ABA Banking Journal - June 2008

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