Survey says companies would rather settle than fight in court

A survey, conducted for Fortiva, an email archiving solution provider, by a company called iTracks, unoovered that 20 percent of the corporations in the survey said they preferred to settle law suits out of court to avoid the costs incurred by archiving and or searching through old emails. While this may surprise some, in my experience large companies have always preferred to settle out of court rather than risk

A survey, conducted for Fortiva, an email archiving solution provider, by a company called iTracks, unoovered that 20 percent of the corporations in the survey said they preferred to settle law suits out of court to avoid the costs incurred by archiving and or searching through old emails.

While this may surprise some, in my experience large companies have always preferred to settle out of court rather than risk having their name mentioned in a negative light in the media, this often includes discrimination suits brought against a company as well as for unsafe working conditions.

The survey was conducted among 90 legal and IT professionals with a median business size of 600 employees and a mean of 1405 employees.

Last year when the rules were first going into effect I wrote up some http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/11/17/47FEfedrules_1.html ">guidelines on how to be in compliance with the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure [FRCP] that went into effect last December 1st.

By the way, here's a helpful hint. If you store your voice mails in an email server, this can be done with Exchange for example, then your company is just as liable for retrieving those documents that are now considered electronic documents.

This is a topic that will not go away and you cannot bury your head in the sand, either. More on this will be coming from Reality Check.