EAST NORTHPORT, NY – January 28, 2008 – Think that email archiving and compliance is the job of your IT department? Think again, according to a new report from global forensic and eDiscovery expert, Stephen Mason. Your IT department is, “at best only the custodians of the records,” says Mason in the report. Instead, the corporate secretary, typically one of the highest officers within an organization, is the true responsible party for email compliance, admonishes Mason. This and other sobering realities about email retention and compliance are discussed in “Email and Litigation,” authored by Mason and made available for complimentary download by Forensic & Compliance Systems (FCS), developer of the Cryoserver (www.Cryoserver.com) forensic email archiving and compliance solution, at http://www.cryoserver.com/email_litigation.

“Forensic & Compliance Systems believes it is important for CIOs, IT managers and organizational officers to understand the important information detailed by Stephen Mason in this report,” said Robin Bingeman, Product Manager at Cryoserver. “We are pleased to be able to make this outstanding report available free of charge to organizations of all sizes that need to understand and take control of their email archiving and compliance requirements.”

• Chief Information Officers and IT managers can also visit FCS at http://www.cryoserver.com/compliance.

To learn more about email archiving compliance.

Stephen Mason is a visiting research fellow for Digital Evidence Research at the prestigious British Institute of International and Comparative Law and author of two recent books on the topic: Electronic Signature in Law, and E-Mail, Networks and the Internet: A Concise Guide to Compliance with the Law. He is also the editor of Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature law Review, Electronic Evidence: Disclosure, Discovery & Admissibility and Electronic Evidence.

In the report, Mason uses actual court examples, including the high-profile anti-trust litigation between Intel and AMD, to highlight specific requirements and consequences of poor email archiving and compliance policies and practices.

One of the concerns highlighted in the report regards whether an email has been altered or not. Mason points out that a common practice in many organizations – to change the subject field of an email to reflect the client or project to which it is related – actually constitutes an alteration to the document which could cause problems if it was later required for court submission.

Mason recommends that CIOs, IT managers and board members recognize their responsibilities when it comes to email archiving and compliance: “The evidence that comes before a court during legal proceedings reflects the way a business operates. Given that virtually every business now uses digital documents and email correspondence in such vast quantities, it is crucial that the documents relied upon by the business are retained properly.”