Why Safe Harbor?
The reasons for providing litigants with limited “safe harbor” when certain documents are destroyed through routine record management systems are clear. Implicit within the recently amended rules is the recognition that given the sheer volume of ESI, it is often difficult, if not impossible, for litigants to guaranty to the court and their opponents that their duty to preserve relevant ESI has been met with 100 percent certainty. More than 95 percent of all information generated today is stored in electronic form (i.e. computer hard drives, digital phones, Blackberries/PDAs, CDs, DVDs, flash cards, etc). Not surprisingly, this information rarely gets reduced to paper form. In 2003, it was estimated that a single day’s worth of e-mail traffic was almost equal to the annual delivery of all mail delivered by the U.S. Postal office. Given this reality, companies often are faced with the competing need to purge voluminous information through routine record retention and document-management
