In the US, the recent case of Zubulake v UBS War-burg illustrates the need for lawyers, both in-house and external, to ensure their clients understand that e-mail correspondence must be disclosed in legal proceedings and technology limitations will not be tolerated as an excuse for failing to produce the evidence.
Further, where the inadequacies of the technology enable employees to delete e-mails completely, adverse inferences are bound to follow, as in Zubulake. It is possible that the costs of failing to prevent the deletion of e-mails may be greater than the purchase of a product that is designed to ensure the organisation retains control over what happens to e-mails, rather than individual employees.
