Back in the days of paper and filing cabinets, when lawyers litigated, they pulled files, made copies, and trucked them off to the opposing lawyers. Now you have to know not only what files you need, but also what server they are stored on, what program created them, who they were sent to and when, how many people responded, and how do you get them to the opposition?

In this article, I'll go over the policies and procedures you should implement to help make better sense of all the data you're processing today. Finally, we'll look at what happens when you actually face a lawsuit, and how to respond, when it occurs.

Just so you know

Before I begin, I'm going to put out my standard disclaimer. I am not an attorney, nor do I play one on TV. I am not qualified, nor am I inclined to dispense legal advice of any kind. What I am is a 12 year computer technologist who has gone from the simplicity of early technology, to being thrust into the middle of litigation due to either the inappropriate use of that technology, or the fact that technology was a vehicle for information to move around and it was now my job to find and produce that information from all its various forms.

On my first day with the Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources (then the Wyoming Department of Commerce), July 5, 1995, I walked into my new office building and proceeded to my supervisor's office. She took me around to meet my new co-workers, and walked me to my office (which doubled as the storage room). She pointed to an unopened computer box and said, "There you go, your first assignment." Inside that box was a bright, shiny, new PC. It was a top of the line, best in class.486/40MHz mini tower with an astounding two MB of memory, and a monstrous 10 GB hard disk drive. This was the most high-powered computer system I had ever worked on.

Flash-forward to today and take a look at the system I am writing this article on. What a difference! Today, I use a laptop system designed as a desktop replacement. It's a Pentium IV, 1.85 GHz with two GB of memory, and a 100 GB hard disk drive. It probably has more processing power than every computer here when I first started and certainly has significantly more power than the servers from back then.

But for all the advances in computer technology, the one that has had the single biggest impact on everyone, from computer technology professionals, to managers to attorneys is storage. Hard disk drives have become smaller in physical size, while increasing exponentially in the amount of information they can hold. Today I have a USB-enabled thumb drive that holds as much in a one inch piece of machinery as I had in my first work computer system. While these devices are becoming a concern, in this article I focus on the current primary concern of computer professionals today: central storage.