"Today a young person graduating from law school and joining a large firm in one of our major cities can look forward to perhaps three or four years of doing nothing but sitting in front of a computer screen reviewing e-mail and other electronic documents for litigation," Withers says.

Although the quantity of documents is daunting, an electronic paper trail does carry an advantage. E-mails are much more searchable than paper documents. In fact, some companies now have proactive filters that can catch troublesome e-mails before anyone files a lawsuit.

For example, financial firms might look for the word "guarantee" — as in "guarantee a return," says Cyndy Launchbaugh, who works for ARMA International, a nonprofit records management group.

Companies often can't uphold such a statement, she says, so if the word, "guarantee" pops up in a company e-mail, the firm might check to make sure employees aren't promising something they can't deliver.

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Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet

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