Social Media: The Next Frontier in e-Discovery (Part 2)
Posted by Juilan Ackert at 11:09 AM
3 comments - Categories: Social Media | Future Trends
For those of us who live in the greater Washington DC metro area, ‘Snowpocalypse 2010’ has consumed our last week. In addition to the massive amount of snow and an unprecedented four-day shut-down of the Federal Government, there has been a vast amount of information shared and distributed through social networking channels. And not just the traditional Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube sites – the local news stations and newspapers are full of content, video, pictures, and posts from readers and listeners.
On Tuesday, February 9, 2010 Google announced a new social networking feature for Gmail called ‘Buzz’. This is not the Internet giant’s first attempt into the realm of social networking, but Buzz offers Gmail users services such as status updates, video and picture sharing, and recommendations of popular content. Google’s integration of these social networking services made me think of a parallel in the Microsoft world – the integration of archiving, retention, and e-discovery into Microsoft Exchange 2010. While Microsoft has always provided a certain level of archiving functionality, the administration of those user created archives has been challenging. With Exchange 2010, Microsoft realized that centralized email retention, legal hold, and recall for discovery is not only essential, but also big business.
What happens when Microsoft realizes the value of integrating social media into Microsoft Exchange – do you think companies will block their employees from social networking? According to the Fulbright and Jaworski 6th Annual Litigation Trends Survey Report, 33% - 40% of companies surveyed block one or more social media sites to internal network users. Many companies may view social media sites as unproductive, unessential, or even counter to a serious corporate image. It makes me wonder whether the corporate culture will change if there was social networking functionality integrated into Exchange. After all, there was a time when instant messaging was thought to be unproductive, but today both Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes integrate and facilitate instant communication technology.
The Litigation Trends Survey Report included another interesting statistic – 4% of US companies and 18% of UK companies have been required to produce social media ESI as part of discovery or disclosure in the 12 months preceding the survey. I find it interesting that more UK companies have been required to produce social media ESI than US companies – I would have expected a reverse of those statistics. The sources of potentially relevant ESI can be narrower when dealing with UK disclosure than it is in US discovery. I’m very interested to see how this statistic changes in next year’s Litigation Trends Survey Report as the wave of social media continues to grow.
tours & travel wrote on 05/27/10 11:37 PM
Thank you for another great article. Where else could anyone get that kind of information in such a perfect way of writing? I have a presentation next week, and I am on the look for such information.