By Melanie Turek, principal research analyst, Nemertes Research, LLC
July 29, 2004

Two recent legal rulings support Nemertes’ call for companies to pay attention to messaging as they develop and implement policies around compliance. This week, Philip Morris was fined $2.75 million for deleting e-mail after a judge ordered in 1999 that the company keep “all documents and other records” that could potentially be relevant to a lawsuit brought by the U.S. government. Until 2002, company policy was to delete all e-mail that was more than 60 days old.

And last week, a federal judge sanctioned UBS AG for destroying, or failing to produce in a timely manner, e-mails in a gender-discrimination lawsuit. At issue is information stored on back-up tapes.

The complete Impact Analysis is available to Nemertes clients. For more information, please contact Chris Zimmerman at chris@nemertes.com