Iron Mountain Offers New Service to Support Electronic Discovery

New Service Helps Businesses Respond Quickly and Cost-Effectively to Data Restoration and Electronic Discovery Requests

August 26, 2003

Boston, MA - Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE:IRM), the leader in outsourced records and information management services, today announced a new Data Restoration and Electronic Discovery Support service designed to help businesses respond swiftly and cost-effectively to the increasing demands for restoration of electronic data during litigation discovery.

The increasing trend to seek incriminating evidence within e-mail, combined with the advent of Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (which places the cost and burden of discovery upon a defendant), has made it very costly and difficult for businesses to respond to electronic discovery requests during fast-paced litigation or regulatory investigations.In order to comply with discovery requests, companies must be able to quickly locate, identify, organize and deliver relevant documents from across the organization in any format, often on very short notice.In reality, most businesses are ill prepared to respond to this type of electronic discovery request – both from a cost and resource perspective.

“The enormous costs, combined with the labor-intensive process of data restoration for electronic discovery, has, in many cases, given plaintiffs substantial leverage to attempt to extort quick and expensive settlements from defendants who have difficulty complying with electronic discovery requests or who find the process too expensive, uncertain and complicated to undertake,” said Erik Christiansen of the law firm Parsons Behle & Latimer. “Businesses subject to increasing litigation or regulatory investigations need a cost-effective solution to quickly restore e-mail from backup tapes and to be able to locate relevant files easily, accurately and with minimal disruption to ongoing business operations.”

Iron Mountain’s Data Restoration and Electronic Discovery Support service helps organizations proactively and cost-effectively gather, restore, search, organize and deliver e-mail and other records for litigation discovery and regulatory investigations. Leveraging Iron Mountain’s Digital Archives platform, the service provides an expeditious way to reduce both the costs and risks associated with electronic discovery.

With this new service, Iron Mountain assumes the laborious task of securely and quickly recovering e-mail and electronic records stored on backup tapes and other media. From there, Iron Mountain captures and indexes the digital records and loads them into its Digital Archive, where the records can be organized within Discovery Folders and made available to the attorneys for review.

As each asset is captured, it is made available via the Digital Archives Web-based user interface where approved users can search, retrieve, view and organize assets. Using Iron Mountain’s sophisticated indexing and powerful search tools, all restored e-mail and other electronic records can be located and accessed instantly from any Web browser. Iron Mountain’s Digital Archives enables secure, online access to businesses so they can search and organize the evidentiary data for sensitive litigation themselves, or they can outsource the task to Iron Mountain.

“An organization's ability to provide complete, secure, and timely access to varied electronic records, while protecting content integrity, managing availability, and protecting sensitive information are the fundamental requirements for an effective archival and legally sound records management strategy," said Charles Brett, senior program director, META Group. "Companies should seek to minimize the cost and labor burdens of data restoration for the purposes of regulatory or litigation discovery, and should benefit from an outsourced service for centralized management, data restoration, and discovery services if faced with a lawsuit or regulatory investigation.”

“Iron Mountain has already restored hundreds of millions of e-mails for our customers. We help them ‘dig out of the hole’ of restoring backup tapes for litigation or regulatory requests,” said Pete Delle Donne, president of Iron Mountain’s Enterprise Solutions and Services Division. “Once they get their heads above water in the litigation process, they quickly realize the benefits of proactively managing e-mail and other electronic records as a risk management practice going forward. Iron Mountain’s Digital Archives service can help companies accomplish that easily and cost-effectively.”

Contact:

Ray Yeung
Brainerd Communicators
Phone: 212-739-6735
yeung@braincomm.com