You've got mail

Emails are increasingly being used (and demanded) as evidence by US courts, and the implications of this are rippling around the globe. Ellen Davis looks at what international firms need to be doing with their email to ensure they can handle the changing, contradictory requirements in this area

Until very recently, discussion about email and electronic communications monitoring, storage, retrieval and e-discovery was very much a US-based phenomenon, and an IT issue. No more.

Propelled by a series of court cases and regulatory enforcement actions, financial services firms in the US now regularly archive most of their email correspondence for a period of time, and have developed robust policies around storage and retrieval. Email issues are also beginning to blossom in the UK and Europe