Companies turn to software for storing, retrieving electronic documents

With its early embrace of Linux and its highly reliable online banking site, KeyBank NA is among the most efficient, cutting-edge banks in the U.S. when it comes to IT — except in one area, until recently.

When Al Coppolo was asked by lawyers at the KeyCorp operating unit to produce old e-mails for litigation or regulatory compliance reasons, he would have as many as four members of his IT team trudge to an offsite storage facility to retrieve tapes, then mount them on servers and painstakingly search for the requested messages.

“It was a completely manual environment,” said Coppolo, who is executive vice president and director of infrastructure at Cleveland-based KeyBank. “Sometimes we would have to look through multiple copies of the same e-mail on multiple tapes if there were multiple replies.”

The process was so laborious and time-consuming that usually his team just barely met a 30-day internal deadline for producing e-mails. And, Coppolo noted, the number of legal requests was only growing. Moreover, new federal e-discovery rules went into effect in December that spelled out requirements for submitting electronic documents – including e-mail and instant messaging logs – as evidence in civil court cases.