Are you looking to the cloud to save costs on data storage? Great idea. But look carefully at the cloud offerings out there. Companies that are going to the cloud should consider whether they can timely retrieve data for legal, regulatory or other business purposes.
This is not a theoretical consideration. Courts have traditionally rejected what I euphemistically call the “messy garage” defense. That defense usually involves a litigant informing the court that its disorganized record keeping makes production of requested documents unduly burdensome. The Brooks v. Macy’s (S.D.N.Y. May 6, 2011) decision from last month is just the latest example of a court rejecting that defense.
In Brooks, an employer was ordered to produce paper healthcare records to the plaintiff in an ERISA lawsuit. The employer had argued that the records were too burdensome to produce because: