Over the last 15 years, the Internet has revolutionized legitimate business communications supplanting the venerable fax machine and creating its own marketing infrastructure. Nowhere is that revolution more prevalent than in the wide acceptance of e-mail as a way to maintain communications between individuals and corporations.

While e-mail may be a killer app, poorly archived e-mail can kill a business. During a recent prescription drug antitrust case, the plaintiff demanded a discovery search of 30 million pages of e-mail stored on the defendant?s backup tapes for names of particular individuals. The defendant suggested the plaintiff shoulder the cost of compiling, formatting, searching, eliminating duplicates, and retrieving the requested e-mail. Sadly, the defendant lost the argument and the court found the burdensome and expensive discovery process was the defendant?s problem because of a bad e-mail retrieval process. The defendant paid through the nose.