The days when business relied on faxes and posted letters to circulate information in an organisation are long gone. Communication is now rooted firmly in the electronic world. A major issue that has arisen as a result is that the internal mechanisms that used to provide a way of limiting the production and reproduction of paper communications have also gone and they have not been replaced by new tools appropriate for the task. When a law firm takes on a big case these days, as often as not the litigation department is faced with a ‘digital monster’.
In the case of e-mail, for example, many more people are now receiving copies of documents as they are cc’d in on the distribution of that document ‘just in case’ they may need to know its contents. Combined with all of the information that was never designed to be printed, in software applications such as Excel, these two factors have led to an explosion in the volume of information being created.
