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Five Tech Steps For GCs To Nip Compliance Issues In The Bud

By Herbert L. Roitblat
February 27, 2006

Good business practice requires that companies take steps to ensure that their employees comply with company policies as well as with the laws, rules, and regulations that apply to them and their industry. An increasingly important part of that practice involves monitoring and storing electronic documents, including e-mails and their attachments and managing these documents throughout the information lifecycle. While an electronic document may have a direct business use of only a few minutes ' perhaps to signal agreement to a contract term ' this same document may have an afterlife of many years, during which it needs to be retained and managed.

Other documents may also present risks to the company. These risks need to be identified and mitigated. An adequate compliance program insures that documents that need to be retained are archived, and only archived for as long as necessary, and that risks be identified and mitigated effectively.

The formal records of an organization may not be adequate to determine whether a company's employees are complying with all of the relevant laws, rules, and regulations that apply to them. When corporate frauds are discovered, for example, half of them are discovered only by accident or through tips not through auditing. Formal controls and records are not sufficient to identify these frauds. Similarly, sexual harassment claims can be very disruptive, and are currently disproportionately represented in e-mails. Proper surveillance of electronic communications can increase the likelihood that these inappropriate behaviors will be discovered. Despite knowing that their corporate e-mail may be monitored, people say things in e-mails that they would never say in paper memos. They treat e-mails as transient communications, more like water cooler conversations than like the records that they are.

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