Legal Issues With Electronic Documents

In general terms, English law does not prescribe a method for the storage of information except for patent applications and bankers books. However, there are many requirements related to industry regulators that historically require paper-based original documents to be retained. This situation is fast changing, with many regulators now accepting well-managed electronic creation and storage of corporate records as normal practice. The Law Society recommends that where a document is converted electronically and the original destroyed, written evidence of the destruction must be preserved.

If paperwork is scanned in-house and there is a chance those documents may need to be presented in evidence in court or other tribunal, it is important to scan to British Standard BS 10008:2008.

The inherent problem with electronic evidence is that is can so easily be manipulated.

We are often asked by clients "can I destroy the original documentation once it has been scanned?" The answer is, as long as you follow the correct process in committing your records to digital image, "yes".

BS 10008:2008 has been with us three years and is a standard to judge the legal integrity of IT systems. In practice, as this standard starts to become more widely adopted, any IT system whose data may be required for use in court will have to be certified.

Increasingly if data cannot be shown to have come from a system certified to BS 10008, lawyers may question the validity of that electronic evidence and will be able to diminish its legal weight, if not have it treated as hearsay and rendered inadmissible.

Adoption of this 2008 standard should form part of a thought-out strategy for managing information risk. Document capture is the process of converting these paper documents and data into reusable electronic information. There are two core reasons businesses deploy document capture solutions:

to store important business records for permanent or long-term preservation; to enable data to be processed more quickly and efficiently. BS 10008 also has a role to play with Building Information Modelling (BIM) which increasingly is taking hold of the process of generating and managing electronic information about a building during its entire life cycle. 3D/4D co-ordination efforts and understanding that "clashes" happen in both space and time takes getting to grips with. Like all material generated on a project there is risk where the contractor participates in drafting the...