Fowler, Tom. Probe Aims At Top: Investigators say Royal Dutch-Shell officials in sights. Aug. 25, 2004.

More on the SEC investigation of Shell. Part of the investigation centered around an e-mail written in October 2002 by the CEO of the exploration and production business at the time (Walter van de Vijver) in which he indicated there was a problem with Shell's disclosures. This highlights the challenge associated with SEC-type inquiries. Could your company find an e-mail from October 2002 with just knowledge of the subject line or keywords in the body? Where would you look? Exchange mailboxes? E-mail archive? Backup tape? PSTs? .MSGs in the file system? As you think through this you'll see the complexity and massive cost associated with these types of investigations. In many cases investigators will spend literally months restoring tape after tape and searching contents for items of interest. A solution like Recovery Manager for Exchange can drastically simplify this work as it relates to backup media but making sure you understand what's entailed and have a strategic plan in place to address forensic discovery is absolutely essential to mitigating risk, not to mention understanding your obligations in terms of retention and destruction of e-mail and/or documents per industry regulations.