The Need to Produce Voice Messages Under FRCP

The new amendments to FRCP covering Electronically Stored Information (ESI), emphasize the importance of producing electronic records on demand during civil litigation. As a result, IT managers in businesses, school districts, and associations, are scrambling to ensure they are compliant with the FRCP expectations. One form of ESI that has been largely overlooked is voice messages. Now that many organizatons are deploying VOIP systems, voice messages have become digital records, and are subject to the same treatment as other ESI

One of the features of many of these VOIP systems is the ability to record voice messages and deliver them into a user's mailbox. A voice message is usually delivered to the user through e-mail as a .WAV file attachment. When the .WAV attachment is opened it will audibly play the recorded message. The very fact that a voice message is captured as a digital file qualifies it as ESI under FRCP.

An e-mail archiving system that captures the attachment can also then serve as a system for archiving voice messages.

As with any legal matter, precedence will add clarity to the interpretation of voice messages as ESI. You can however most certainly expect that, when an opposing lawyer suspects that a voice message might contain evidence valuable to his cause, he/she will insist that these messages be treated no different from e-mail messages in the eyes of the court.

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