Finding Emails
As we have seen, emails can often contain valuable and important information, they can also act as vital links in the chain of evidence required to justify a course of action or protect the institution's legal interests. Any of this is only possible if all relevant emails can be identified and located when required. The focus during this semi-active phase of the lifecycle is therefore less on ensuring that the individual user can navigate their emails effectively and more on the issues presented by the need to locate emails from across the entire institution in response to an external demand. That said the ability to meet these demands as an institution will largely be dependent on the actions of individual users and the way in which they create, name and manage their messages as described in the creation and active use phases.
The Advantage Of Central Storage
Any form of external request for information held by the institution, be it an FOI or Environmental Information Regulations Request, Subject Access Request under the Data Protection Act or any other type of legal discovery exercise may well cover emails received by staff across the length and breadth of the institution. This is one of the reasons why the use of IMAP over POP as the method of retrieving emails is recommended - see Active use - Remote/home use of email for further details. Central storage of emails at least provides the potential for cross-server analysis and resource discovery using any one of a number of commercial email management or 'archiving' software. Emails stored locally on individual PCs, laptops or external storage media will not be covered and therefore may not be found during any such discovery exercise.
It is important that any such analysis of staff user accounts is conducted in accordance with the law, as outlined in the Active use - Monitoring email use section.
It is more likely that any discovery exercise will relate to a specific topic or event ("I would like to see all information relating to topic X", or "there is a court case pending relating to the patent of research project Y") rather than just to email specifically. It is for this reason that we suggest managing email alongside all the other information to which it relates. That way all information relating to topic X or Y will be located and easily retrieved from one place.
User Behaviour During A Legal Discovery Exercise
Despite these measures it is inevitable that individual users will hold emails and other information which relate, no matter how tangentially, to the topic under investigation. Any staff who are believed to have played a role in the process or to have received information relating to it should be immediately and explicitly instructed not to delete any emails which relate to the area under investigation. They should then be asked to identify and make available any relevant emails for inspection. The compulsory nature of this instruction, the need to ensure comprehensive disclosure and the necessity of its swift completion should all be communicated to the user (who may otherwise consider it to be of low priority). The relative ease with which staff are able to carry out their role in this process will largely be determined by the degree to which the measures outlined in the creation and active use phases of this resource have been adopted.
