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Tell corporate clients to archive social media accounts

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: April 18, 2014

Most companies know by now that they have to archive all of their electronic communication as a fundamental part of the now-evolved e-discovery world. But how many of them include social media in those archives?

Not very many, as it turns out.

According to some recent studies, most major corporations have at least a half dozen Facebook accounts, and some have as many as 200. And 90 percent of them have Twitter accounts.

But, according to a study recently analyzed in Computer Weekly magazine, “businesses are creating vast amounts of uncontrolled content and risk legal action because of inadequate archiving and eDiscovery systems.”

As written about here several times, Facebook and other social media are being brought into evidence in ever-increasing fashion, and that trend can only continue. So a company had better be able to produce said data when necessary.

But very companies are looking at it that way, at least not at the present. Social media is not static. People are constantly updating and erasing posts, which means that archiving them can be an expensive pain, and one that most companies do not yet feel is necessary, apparently.

One British study, for instance, showed that only 6 percent of those companies archived social media content, and that only 20 percent of them can even access their social media content in a way that could be archived if they wanted to.

Actually, this is kind of par for the course. Research in both the U.S. and U.K. show that fewer than 60 percent of companies think that their data archiving is adequate anyway, even though over 70 percent acknowledge its importance.

It does seem to me that it would take a very sophisticated IT department to make sure that social media data is properly archived. Either the company has to buy a bunch of servers, or contract out to an archiving company. Probably the latter would be the most efficient, and spread the risk out a bit, but also, obviously, the most expensive, and the archiving company has to be really top-notch.

But sanctions do await those companies who don’t archive this material. Tell your clients.


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