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What is “information management”?

“We will have to learn, before understanding any task, to first ask the question, “What information do I need, and in what form, and when?…” Peter Druker, “What Executives Need to Learn”

Information Management (IM) involves the management of information as it progresses through the information lifecycle: capture, processing, use, storage, and destruction. Nowadays many companies make use of electronic document management systems (EDMS) to manage this process.

As we are well aware, new technology breeds new legal issues. In the context of IM, the legal issues include:

• being satisfied that the electronic documents generated by users and stored in the EDMS will be admissible in a Court of law, at a future date, should a dispute arise in which the documents stored may be required as evidence
• maximising evidential weight by working out how one is going to present electronic evidence to court in such a way that it will be admitted, even if the original is destroyed and in the face of one’s opponents taking highly technical legal points to potentially discredit the electronically stored evidence.

In order to achieve this, strategic planning has to be done ahead of any such potential crisis looming. Such planning should include:

• having a proper Record Retention & Destruction Policy (RRDP) in place (to show a Court that IM is part of normal business procedures, especially when it comes to allegations of unlawful destruction of evidence)
• taking steps to comply with ‘duty of care’ legal requirements such as (i) retaining records the law says you must retain, (ii) allocating responsibility to look after information assets (in order to prevent them from being given to the wrong person or falling into the wrong hands) and (iii) making sure you are able to produce evidence when called upon to do so in Court
• understanding what technical arguments can be raised in Court to try and persuade the Court to reject your electronic evidence, such as (i) attacking the integrity of an electronic document, (ii) questioning the system which produced the paper, the method of storage and who had access to it (in order to show that the evidence was not stored in a ‘proper manner’, (iii) the data was captured incorrectly, the image was captured incorrectly, the medium on which the data was stored could be modified without detection and so on…the technical arguments are potentially only limited by a lawyers lack of knowledge of the technology itself.

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