Was that cat meme you emailed to a colleague, or a department-wide email reminding employees that Friday is ugly sweater day, or even that receipt of a fax machine purchased in 1995 pertinent to the business or regulations? Most likely not. But you'd be surprised at what gets retained.

On the final day of Legalweek, at the "The Future Is Now: Managing Messaging Data" session, two Reed Smith lawyers will look at the data management practices that can help whittle down unneeded data. They'll also highlight some personal case studies of how clients removed unessential data to reduce risk and ultimately benefit the company.

More people are leaving an expanding digital footprint through instant messaging and emails. Companies are no exception, as emails are used by many employees for daily correspondence and to perform daily tasks. But housing and combing through that data can be lengthy and expensive when much of the data isn't meaningful to government regulations or the business's goals.

"Where this is coming from is most organizations have not placed controls to manage emails," said Reed Smith partner Therese Craparo. "They either kept everything because storage is cheap and you can keep everything, or they allow employees to manage it."

Unneeded data causes a strain on a company's finances. After all, it can be expensive to host unneeded data on a server or in physical storage. What's more, the inessential data may also pose a cybersecurity risk.

"There is a significant amount of risk associated with this type of data. Those risks include a cybersecurity area; it is an area that is usually a weak spot," said Anthony Diana, who co-chairs Reed Smith's intellectual property, technology and data group. "Phishing is often the easiest way to get into an enterprise because of that. There are a lot of concerns because the email systems have a lot of data that is sensitive."

Senior management at many organizations are now acknowledging they need to have a handle on their data, the lawyers said. But that may be difficult to impose, as legal and IT departments struggle to agree on what data can be removed.

"Management is saying we need to get rid of all this, IT struggles because legal says we can be sanctioned or have a legal hold and keeps onto it," Craparo explained.

Yet searching such extensive data may also be expensive. "If there's a legal hold, they have to search that and it's costly to reproduce in litigation," Diana added.

The Reed Smith lawyers said data is more likely to be stored and analyzed in the cloud, but companies shouldn't dump all of their data into it. Whittling down the necessary data stored is important when leveraging technology to analyze data, they said. 

Successfully implementing a daily routine of disposing data not needed for business, regulations and/or legal is the goal.

"The idea of just keeping it, it really isn't an option anymore, I think all organizations realize that," Diana said.