Businesses need to face the Himalaya of data looming in the back offices. Manage it before an avalanche of court costs hits, say Alabama legal specialists in e-discovery.

Many Alabama businesses, from small to large, constantly generate electronic data of various sorts, from emails to spreadsheets, receipts and diagrams. Without a plan to manage that ever-growing amount of electronic data, legal professionals warn, data storage can get out of hand, making a business vulnerable to a costly electronic-discovery process if the business ever faces litigation. "The costs for searching through a company's data potentially can be astronomical if the company hasn't instituted a formal data retention plan to get rid of unneeded data and keep needed data organized and fully accessible," says attorney Marty Burke, a partner with Burr & Forman, a regional law firm with 11 offices in Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Businesses should first map all the places their electronic data is stored to get a better handle on it, says attorney Ty Dedmon, a partner at Bradley, a law firm based in Birmingham with nine offices across the South and Washington D.C. Because of the collaborative nature of many business procedures, the storage of electronic data used by multiple individuals has become more complicated.

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