If you have a general business policy or organizational structure that purges all e-mails, then there wouldn't be any obligation to go back and produce all the e-mails, he said. Exceptions include spoliation (the destruction of evidence) and litigation holds (a stop order).

Developing an e-mail archiving policy is not just a tech issue, said Thomas Sutton, a litigation partner at in Toronto. "One of the biggest challenges I see in making sure that the various parts of the enterprise actually do co-ordinate on this," he said.

Depending on the size of the institution, this could include IT, in-house legal counsel, human resources, corporate security and records management, he said.

(To get a basic understanding of Canadian e-discovery law and how it differs from the U.S., read ".")