It’s not just the Fortune 1000 companies. Even small-to-midsize companies are in danger of a receiving a subpoena from almost any direction, with demands for a quick turnover of electronically stored information (ESI).

For many companies, this is something they’d rather not think about.

Ina recent ZD-net article, data security expert Oliver Marks proposes that companies start preparing for such a demand. It’s no longer just banks and drug companies that have to plan for such demands. He starts by trying to have managers think of what the ESI consists of:

“Oversimplifying, there are fundamentally two types of data: structured, meaning tracked through processes (in theory) and relatively easily rolled up into a format that can be searched and analyzed for the above legal activity, and unstructured, which can be less easily retrievable.”

It’s the unstructured data that is the big worry: emails, memos, videoconferences, voicemails, text messages, and, increasingly, the content of collaborative Web-based activity. As the promise of the digital collaboration using social media and Web 2.0 approaches become more and more real, IT departments are under much greater stress than when documents “belonged” to a single department and could be more easily located. For example, Marks cites legal precedence for the wholesale subpoenaing of employee text messages as a precedent that could burn any company.

The problem is that all these new collaborative media are adopted ad hoc, under the radar, and in an uncoordinated manner by most companies. Suddenly the IT department is faced with a flurry of data that calls out for collection and protection, data that’s not in anyone’s plan and which is hard to categorize on the fly and requires mastery of a variety of different formats. By comparison, collecting invoices, shipping data, and standard emails is easy.

Marks identifies a few approaches to solving this growing issue, but most important, we think, he’s put his finger on a problem that many companies don’t even yet realize exists.

Tags: ESI, subpoena