Storing company emails

There is no easy answer to this question. Your company should consult with a litigation expert and develop a written document retention policy to cover this issue.

E-mails can help or harm your company depending on the particular situation. Generally, there is no law requiring you to keep e-mails. I would suggest, however, that you have a regular e-mail destruction policy so that your company isn't accused later of destroying harmful evidence. Of course, once you know or should know of potential litigation regarding a particular matter, you should no longer destroy e-mail related to that matter. If you do, you could suffer from an "adverse inference" at trial, where the judge instructs the jury that they are to assume that you destroyed e-mails related to the matter because they were harmful (even if the were not harmful).

This is a good question that raises a number of issues -- issues becoming more common in today's business environment. There is no hard and fast rules about document (and electronic data) retention policies. Further whatever rules you understand and adopt today, may be changed next year. So continuing education and re-evaluation are in order on this topic.

Arguably, keeping a document or electronic data too long (or in too many places) may have as much risk as not saving it long enough. It depends on the type of data, your regulatory environment, your business and many other factors. If you company is large, one "size" retention policy may not fit all of the departments or subsidiaries.

No matter whether its a document retention policy for electronic "business records" or old-fashioned paper, document retention and preservation have been, and remain, a necessity since: (1) document retention for types of documents turn on the importance of those documents and their possible uses; (2) burdens and rules about anti-spoliation once litigation has ensued have and do exist whether the business records are paper or electronic data; (3) Consistency in implementing the policy is important (or you can suffer presumptions about improper loss or destruction of records); and (4) coordination among legal and accounting requirements, and business requirements for institutional retention of information must be accomplished.

Thus, it is advisable to meet with your business attorney, tax advisor, and financial planner to develop a properly balanced approach to document/data retention and processing. You should revisit these policies at least annually. Recognize that once a claim or litigation starts, you may have new burdens or requirements.

State Required Legal Ethics Disclosure: This Answer and any information contained in this answer is not intended to be treated as legal advice; And, this posting does not create an attorney-client relationship or privilege of any kind. This attorney licensed only in Georgia.

All good information above. My inclination though is that you are starting from the wrong end of this problem. Instead of thinking through the legal aspects, ask this question "should you store email for a business purpose?" For instance, you may want to keep track of emails because your employees conduct business by email. You may want to have track of them to see how much "non-work" email you send-receive. Whatever you decide to do it should be uniform and systematic and you should have the policy written down. You should probably also let your employees know what the policy is and then stick to it.