Archive or be damned

As the office email is finding its way increasingly into the law courts, isn't it about time companies started taking the archiving issue far more seriously than they have been? Dianne See-Morrison asks what's on offer from the technology industry

If firms ever needed a reason to take email storage seriously, they need only look back to last May, when Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley lost a securities fraud case to Ron Perelman, the billionaire financier.

The case – in which email evidence played a star role – was an embarrassment to the bank, exposing just how shambolic its system for preserving emails had become. In the course of the trial, Morgan Stanley was ordered to turn over certain emails relating to the case. What ensued was a