However, Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross' Dickey counsels that routine deletion is no excuse for destroying something on legal hold. "You must stop and suspend automatic retention and deletion systems in order to secure relevant data," he says.

Bottom line: You are legally required to secure all relevant data. If you screw up here, the court can say you are obstructing justice, and the judge may assume that the data was detrimental to your case -- as in Zubulake v. UBS Warburg.

Software solutions

Although the onus for compliance will always be on the business itself, many companies are looking to their ERP vendors for solutions. For instance, as PSS's Paknad notes, Fortune 20 companies are going to expect that their transaction and knowledge management systems support retention periods and legal holds. At the moment, few enterprise applications are doing that.

A sea change is exactly what the Fortune 20 will expect in the next year or two; in fact, it's already happening. Paknad says that her Fortune 20 clients are implementing policies for 2007 that will require all systems brought online to support retention lifecycles, legal holds, and collection requests for litigation.