A gigabyte of email storage equals about 100,000 messages. A terabyte is a thousand times that (one hundred million messages).

At an annual growth rate of 18%, you’ll double every four years. The cost for review documents (according to hundreds of recent Assessment for Records Risks^TM clients) is at least $3.00 per page.

This means that every unnecessary gigabyte of email (and every company has a lot of unnecessary gigabytes being retained) equals at least $300,000 in review costs. A terabyte is a thousand times worse.

No wonder so many companies settle unmerited cases to avoid discovery and review costs in the first place. (Wonder if plaintiffs’ attorneys have noticed this?)

Maybe it’s time to start driving the volume and costs down, instead of assuming that they have to keep going up. Because they don’t. And they shouldn’t. Most companies passed by “enough” years ago.