Establish and Empower a Litigation Response Team

As part of your overall IM and e-mail management program, be sure to name a litigation response team. Make the team responsible

for ensuring that your standard document destruction policy is halted immediately in response to litigation or pending litigation. Ideally your litigation response team should include outside legal counsel, in-house corporate counsel, the human resources manager, your records manager, business line supervisors, and your chief information officer.

Under the direction of your legal counsel, your litigation response team will assume primary responsibility for enforcing written rules and policies governing employees’ IM and e-mail use, establishing electronic data retention policies, ensuring that the organization’s destruction policies halt as soon as you become aware that a lawsuit is in play or at risk of being filed, and delivering exactly what the court wants—in exactly the form the court wants it—in response to an electronic discovery request. ^[13]

^[13]‘‘Top 10 Tips for Effective Electronic Records Management,’’ Kroll Ontrack, www.krollontrack.com.