It may come as a surprise to some but email is figuring more and more prominently in litigation. For construction companies that presents yet another trail that should be preserved. One such company in El Paso found that out when it couldn’t find an email that would exonerate it from a lawsuit by a client.

Jon Brodkin at Network World wrote the article about C.F. Jordan and the lawsuit filed by a school system claiming a failure on the project was Jordan’s responsibility. The construction company searched for the one email from two years before that would prove it wasn’t involved in that portion of the project but couldn’t find it.

According to a Jordan spokesperson digging through PST files got to be so expensive and time consuming in responding to the 10 lawsuits it faces each year that the company spent $29,000 on a storage archival and retrieval system just for email. The spokesperson said paying for that was a drop in the bucket compared to the million dollars a year it spends in legal fees.

Of course as more and more documentation has moved to electronic status there is more and pressure on IT departments to be able to produce documents as needed for litigation. That litigation load is nothing to blink at. According to a recent article in Business Wire a third of U.S. corporations are juggling at least 25 lawsuits each, at any one time, and 18 percent are responding to more than 100 cases domestically. While these numbers seem steep it should be noted that they are down significantly from a year ago. In the U.K. however the lawsuits are up.

What’s the cost of all this litigation? One in five U.S. companies say they are spending $5 million or more annually.

You can check out a comparison of email message archiving tools on this page at Network World, or originate your own comparison on this page.

Recent News