Why is Email Archiving Important for the Legal Sector?

Emails continue to be the undisputed most valuable information asset for businesses of all sizes and segments. In the middle of rapid digitalization and the pandemic's forced shift to remote work, email volumes have rapidly increased - Statista predicts that daily emails will increase from 306.4 billion in 2020 to more than 376.4 billion by 2025.

This growing information flood and inbox overload means that email archiving (the act of preserving and making searchable all emails sent to and from an individual) has become an important issue for organizations. In fact, IMARC states that the global corporate information archiving market, in which email plays a major role, was valued at $6.51 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $14.91 billion by 2027, with an increase of more than 14% over six years.

Email Management in the Legal Sector

Although emails are a fundamental communication tool and real business evidence for many, including legal professionals, many organizations default to traditional email servers as the storage system. However, since case-related emails almost always contain personal data and often sensitive information, the issue of data privacy compliance quickly rises to the surface, often perceived as a potential conflict with storage obligations. Storing emails only in Outlook or Gmail is usually not sufficient to comply with data privacy regulations or rules applicable especially to highly regulated sectors. In addition, many countries require businesses to store electronic data for tax audits and other investigative purposes, increasing the need for independent email archiving and email data management strategies. In addition, email archiving helps a company defend its legal rights in the future and keeps records of important agreements, statements, and contracts.

As regulatory standards on the disclosure and processing of personal data vary across different governments worldwide, email archiving has now become a central issue for many businesses to ensure that personal data is processed in accordance with various laws across the governance organs.

For legal professionals, whether they are defending clients or helping organizations design policies, understanding a few highlighted principles that define legal email archiving is very important.

These rules can be complex and vary by customer, data storage policies are usually subject to specific sector requirements - especially in the healthcare or financial services sectors. When a company draws up a strategy to comply with storage requirements, it must also take into account data privacy laws. In this article, we will share some basic information about regulations to equip legal professionals with the initial knowledge they need to defend or draft their clients' email archiving policies.

Common Policies and Regulations

Legal professionals, when designing email storage policies for businesses, should be aware of factors mandated by the EU's data privacy policies and regulations, especially regarding general principles for processing personal data according to Article 5 of the GDPR and the right to erasure as outlined in Article 17 of the GDPR. The EU GDPR, although no longer applicable in the UK due to Brexit, has a very similar GDPR in the UK.

According to Article 17, individuals who have personal data stored by companies have the right to request deletion under certain conditions and businesses are obligated to comply. Automatic deletion rules can help companies comply with some of these principles, but they must also consider the mandatory different data storage durations mandated by legislation. Email archiving solutions can help identify relevant emails using search functions and provide an audit trail or daily log as a record of legal deletion documents if needed.

An email archiving solution can also help ensure compliance with Article 5 of the GDPR, which summarizes general principles for processing personal data, using features such as automatic deletion rules, encryption, access restrictions, and audit logs. These principles include ensuring integrity and confidentiality, accountability, purpose limitation, and data minimization - for example, automatically deleting an email after it has achieved its original purpose.

However, it is important to consider that comprehensive application of the undefined data regulations for certain situations or countries on a global or departmental level may not be sufficient for large corporations. For example, in Germany, there are specific requirements for the permanent deletion of emails and other documents related to job applications after a maximum storage period of approximately three to six months.

In conclusion, the role of GDPR is to determine the rights of individuals residing in the EU to decide how their personal data is collected, stored, or otherwise processed and to ensure that it is used legally and securely for the purpose of collection.

While some organizations fully comply with this law and have legal procedures in place to protect data confidentiality, many businesses lack mechanisms that archive emails from IT systems and provide protection against tampering or unauthorized access. This is especially important when considering that EU and UK businesses' customers may have the right to use their data rights, including requesting access to emails within a month of making the request without unnecessary delays.

Organizations can face heavy fines for not complying with GDPR - this means that all emails must be stored securely and appropriately, and be easily accessible in their original formats if needed. Fines can be up to €20 million or up to 4% of the company's global annual turnover (whichever is higher). In fact, as of February, the total amount of GDPR fines is now close to €1.6 billion, and the highest fine so far is €746 million - imposed on Amazon for not complying with general data privacy principles.

Therefore, it is clear that all law firms must closely monitor how they and their clients manage and archive their electronic communication environment to ensure compliance with the latest data protection regulations.

Defining Storage and Compliance

Considering that email storage requirements can vary by sector, country, and possibly even company, it is generally important for lawyers and compliance officers to ensure that emails are stored in archives compliant with current legal and commercial requirements, while also ensuring protection against deletion or unauthorized access due to malicious actors, employee errors, or other reasons.

Law firms must consider rules that align with data storage policies for specific sectors. For example, there may be different regulatory storage obligations for healthcare, finance, insurance, or pharmaceutical companies. In addition, law firms themselves may be required by bar rules or other regulations to keep records of clients and cases for a certain period.

Data storage and management systems can be a major challenge. Considering the need to ensure that data is protected in its correct form during cyber attacks, data loss, and data confidentiality situations while ensuring business continuity, email archiving solutions are very important for lawyers.

Legal businesses require these solutions to comply with appropriate storage periods according to country and sector guidelines, as well as to remain compliant and avoid conflicts with data privacy and security regulations. However, they can then adopt a reliable information management strategy that allows them to monitor information flow, ensure the availability of mission-critical data, and scale over time.

This article was first published at https://www.legal-brief.co.uk/features-analysis/email-archiving-and-the-legal-sector/.

Source: Why is email archiving important for the legal sector? (mailstore.com)