Email Archiving, Compliance, and Retention Guide

It’s common for legal discovery to span years of background research and data collection. To fulfill their legal obligations, enterprise organizations require a retention strategy. Email archiving takes copies and backs up data for years, securing it from malicious threat actors. It’s essential to note that email archives function differently from standard backup files. A good email archiving solution stores files in a way that makes it convenient and fast for legal professionals to find the information they need for legal discovery and proceedings. 

Compliance regulations such as HIPAA, FRCP, FINRA, and SOX have email retention policies for legal professionals, depending on the industry of their clients. For example, if you represent healthcare professionals and store PHI, HIPAA requires attorneys to retain data and keep archives of their email data. 

TitanHQ offers an email archiving solution designed for legal professionals who store sensitive client data. Our solution adheres to compliance regulations and provides attorneys and other legal entities with access to files for years. Archived files are indexed and managed by the TitanHQ solution, allowing for fast and secure legal research into old email data. Authorized users can search, save, and tag email conversations, saving hours in the discovery process. 

Finding a Retention Plan and Email Archiving Strategy for Legal Compliance 

IT professionals working with legal professionals are aware of the importance of backups, but they often overlook the importance of email archives and retention plans. Audit trails and backups are compliance requirements, but a retention plan is frequently a business standard specific to the industry. In the legal profession, retention plans are usually quite long to ensure that a trail of communications is available for years. 

To illustrate the importance of a retention plan, suppose that your law firm suffers from a data breach. After the incident response and investigation, researchers found that malware was introduced to the environment several months prior. To ensure that the same incident doesn’t happen, researchers can go through archived email messages to find who introduced the malware and how the malware accessed the environment. This step in investigations and “lessons learned” during incident response helps remediate the issue by training employees on the signs of a cyber-threat and ensuring that the malware is eradicated from the network. It’s especially important for advanced persistent threats that add backdoors to make it more difficult to completely remove them from the environment. 

A few more ways email archiving can help legal firms: 

• Compliance: FINRA, HIPAA, and PCI DSS require audit trails and backups for disaster recovery and any incident response to data breaches. Email archiving solutions like ArcTitan keep law firms and legal professionals compliant with the latest requirements. 
• E-discovery: Legal professionals spend hours going through email messages for litigation and investigations, but a good email archiving solution can cut down on this time. Email archiving solutions let legal researchers tag, store, export, and organize important documents. 
• Cloud-based storage management: Backups eat up storage space, and you don’t need years of files stored as backups. Administrators can store archives in the cloud to free up storage space for backups, but keep a copy of older files. 

In an emergency situation, backups are used for disaster recovery, but email archives can also be used to find older emails and send them to a user’s inbox. Email archives aren’t primarily used for backups, but they are useful if backup files are corrupted and can’t be used for recovery. Most importantly, email archiving solutions provide a scalable way to store years of email messages without interfering with the day-to-day administration of the network. It’s a convenient way to stay compliant with retention plan requirements and backups. 

Benefits for MSPs Handling Attorney Clients 

It’s not uncommon for law firms to outsource their IT management to management service providers. MSPs assume the responsibility of ensuring their legal clients' compliant with the latest government regulations. TitanHQ solutions make it convenient yet secure for MSPs to handle their client data and roll out solutions to multiple clients, all while managing them in a single interface. 

For example, suppose an MSP client is a law firm specializing in healthcare litigation. Healthcare data is notoriously valuable to threat actors. It contains enough information for an attacker to sell on darknet markets, and with sufficient data, it can result in a seven-figure payout.  

In this scenario, a breach could be devastating. The law firm may face millions in legal, reputational, and operational costs, and depending on the contractual relationship, the MSP could be held liable for failing to adequately protect their client. However, by implementing robust cybersecurity solutions including email archiving and backup MSPs can significantly reduce this risk. 

Email archiving ensures that all communications are securely stored, indexed, and tamper-proof, enabling faster forensic investigation in the event of a breach or legal inquiry. It also helps the client remain compliant with industry regulations like HIPAA, which require secure handling and retention of healthcare communications. Meanwhile, having a reliable backup solution in place allows the MSP to quickly restore compromised systems or lost data, minimizing downtime, limiting exposure, and maintaining business continuity. 

In essence, these cybersecurity measures not only protect the client’s sensitive data but also shield the MSP from potential liability, reputation damage, and costly legal disputes,turning cybersecurity into a critical component of client trust and operational resilience. 

Whether you’re an IT professional handling a legal firm's infrastructure or an MSP managing several legal firms, email archiving is necessary. Compliance violations can be costly, usually paid per record disclosed. By utilizing TitanHQ’s comprehensive range of cybersecurity solutions, law firms can significantly enhance their cybersecurity posture and minimize the risk of data breach. 

Sign up for a free demo to see the TitanHQ email security solutions in action.