If you feel overwhelmed by the amount of information that you have to deal with during the course of your work, there may be good cause. As Sonya Sigler notes, one study reports that enough data - predominantly electronic - was created in one year to fill 37,000 Libraries of Congress. The article goes on to discuss smart data management policies that can mitigate the costs and risks associated with such quantities of data.
One of the occasions when businesses come face to face with the reality of all that data is when they are required to respond to a Hart-Scott-Rodino Second Request relating to a proposed merger. Reforms to that process, which are outlined in our second article, go some way toward easing the burden of Second Request responses.
Finally, have you ever had to defer a lunch appointment because you were busy shredding documents, possibly illegally? If so, you might want to learn from our final piece not to memorialize the fact in email that may some day not be quite as private as you believed at the time of writing.
By Sonya Sigler
How much would it cost to house 37,000 Libraries of Congress? That is how much new electronic data is created in a single year, according to one study. Fortunately, the data is stored in computers not in a monumental building, but the costs of creating, storing and managing data nevertheless are significant and growing for all businesses.
A version of this article appeared in the April 2006 issue of e-Discovery Law & Strategy. For Sonya's original text, visit http://cataphora.com/out.php?go=j9178.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras today announced a series of reforms to the agency's merger review process. The reforms are designed to reduce the costs and time required to complete merger investigations in which "second requests" have been issued under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Premerger Notification Act. Second requests are issued if the Commission needs more information from the merging parties after the initial 30-day HSR waiting period. The reforms, which are set out and explained in a document that is available on the FTC's Web site, apply to all HSR filings submitted to the FTC on or after February 17, 2006.
Read more at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2006/02/merger_process.htm
By Andrea Coombes
If you needed another reason not to send personal e-mails from work, here it is.
A company promoting its new e-mail monitoring tool has posted a batch of Enron e-mails onto a new website, grouped into easily searchable categories such as "objectionable" and "personal use."
No doubt some of the messages - such as the many lewd jokes forwarded as mass-mailings - will ring familiar to some U.S. workers. Others offer more ghoulish humor: "This week is not good. I have too large a pile of documents to shred. Next week is better."
You can read the full article at http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/14346300.htm
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