11.1 Yours to discover Discovery is the process of searching across all e-mail records and identifying those that match the discovery and hold order, usually when ordered by courts (and related to hold orders). After being filtered to remove anything under any attorney-client privilege or other classified restriction, and following negotiation with both sides of the legal issue on the terms and issues to search on, the final e-mail record results must be made records (if they are not already), placed on a hold (so they remain until the end of the legal issue), and exported to opposing council (maybe to a CD archive of some size in some agreed format). Note: The key to practical electronic discovery for e-mail starts with strong processes, manual practices, and knowledge of the e-mail storage and record system infrastructure. The time and costs of resources and equipment to do discovery is huge. Imagine an organization that has kept years of backup tapes of their e-mail servers. Microsoft was one such organization that was ordered by the courts to restore all their e-mail backups and perform e-mail searches related to the Netscape case. One can only guess that if e-mail had been made records and destroyed consistently and correctly, that the alleged embarrassing e-mail from Bill Gates referring to actions against Netscape would not have been discoverable.