By Michael Purcell, Senior Discovery Consultant, Encore Legal Solutions

An emerging issue in electronic discovery, especially for financial services companies, is managing “Bloombergs,” proprietary instant messages and email sent from financial professional to financial professional via proprietary Bloomberg terminals. Despite its unique and proprietary nature, Bloomberg Mail is Electronic Business Information and must be retained, held and produced like any other electronic record.

The Bloomberg messaging system is a prevalent communication tool used within the financial industry. The system provides news, research and coverage of the world markets, usually via the Bloomberg terminals that are ubiquitous at financial services and other firms.  Additionally it allows its users to communicate electronically.

As Electronic Business Communications, Bloomberg Mail is subject to the same compliance regulations as other Electronically Stored Information. Potential litigation makes it critical for companies to archive this data and make it available for discovery.  The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also mandates retention.

Most companies maintain corporate email policies which specify email retention timeframes.  And the ability to preserve electronic data due to a litigation hold is a must for all corporations.  This process not only needs to be extended to Bloomberg mail, but also documented, implemented and managed.  This means that gaining an understanding of preservation and archive Bloomberg mails should be a proactive step by any company using this service.

While most companies successfully back up information, most fail to plan for the recovery and eventual production of that information. This may be especially true in regards to Bloomberg Mail, which corporate records managers may not realize is part of the company’s ESI.

Most Bloomberg systems include Bloomberg IM and Bloomberg Mail.  These services are not a local client such as an MS Exchange Server or Lotus Notes Server (where are the emails or text messages resided on the companies system), but instead they are processed through a proprietary application on the Bloomberg servers.  Bloomberg does allow for its clients to access these messages for archival purposes via daily FTP downloads, and some enterprise content management systems are designed to retain these.  While that solves for preservation and compliance, it is important to consider what happens when you need to access the archive files.

Available for daily download from the Bloomberg System, the system’s archive files are in raw ASCII text format with several hundred, if not thousands, of messages in each and every archive text file.  A standard keyword search or filter on one of these files would not be able to differentiate between the email with the actual hit and the thousands that are not relevant or responsive. To processes these at the message level, the first step would be to parse the archive files into individual email files. 

At Encore, we have developed an application to parse Bloomberg messages into their originally intended units. Once the messages are parsed into separate files, these can be loaded into a review system such as Concordance, FYI or iCONECT.  Since these original archive files or parsed message files are text, they do not carry any true metadata fields; however, standard metadata fields can be extracted from the parsed text files.  This includes fields such as: Author, Recipient, Sent Date, Subject and Body.  This extraction can then be loaded into a hosted or local litigation support package for searching, review and designate messages to be produced.

There are ways to make use the Bloomberg Archive system to your advantage.  Whether you are reviewing for SEC request or litigation document production request, you can use the multiple daily archive files to isolate a specific date range to be included in your review.  Ideally, this date range would be agreed upon between parties ahead of time to avoid additional processing fees down the road.  Removing just a few days, weeks, or months out of the timeframe to be processed can reduce the review population by thousands of emails.

It is also important to know production requirements ahead of time.  If you are cooperating with a government entity, the delivery may be mandated in a specific native format.  If this format is a specific email system, such as Outlook, you will want to keep in mind that the native Bloomberg files are not readily loadable into outlook.  The messages must be converted from text-formatted Bloomberg messages to Outlook. 

Because they reside on a proprietary system, and do not download very cleanly, “Bloombergs” can be particularly difficult to deal with in a discovery or investigative context. However, we’ve learned that a bit of extra planning and a good process can easily overcome these obstacles. 

Michael Purcell is senior discovery consultant at Encore Legal Solutions. He joined Encore in January 2007 with 14 years of industry experience, both as a consultant and as a project manager at a law firm. Michael can be reached at mpurcell@encorelegal.com.