We all see the numbers concerning the exponential growth of Electronically Stored Information (ESI). A recent report by Michael Knight of content manager.com states that unstructured content will see an annual growth of between 65% and 200%. At rates like these, organizations will shortly become overwhelmed with stored content. At the same time, legal and regulatory obligations make it critical that the right content is accessible in the event of litigation or audit.

Since a large percentage of unstructured content is email and other messaging data, there is bound to be a lot of extraneous content. This can range from messages with absolutely no business value ("I'll meet you in front of the building for lunch") to critically important business decisions ("Make sure that all safety procedures are followed to the letter"). So how do you go about saving what matters and discarding the rest?

The best way to handle this situation is through a consistent and disciplined retention and disposition policy. There is no formal standard outlining what content to save and how long to save it. In fact the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) only state that organizations implement or update document retention policies to include Electronically Stored Information (ESI). What the courts want is a documented retention and disposition policy and proof that it is followed consistently.

So if your policy is to keep email for five years, and you have vast amounts of email that is older than that, it is acceptable to gather up and delete the old content. If you wait and are hit with a Discovery obligation tomorrow, it's not as simple, because you're obligated to save anything that might be relevant to impending litigation, and there could be something in that old email/

So for email, as well as other content, now is the best time to get your house in order, while there is nothing to require you to keep the content. You'll spend less time and money keeping content you have no business reason to keep, and in the event of litigation or a compliance audit, you'll have far less content to search through and review.