One of the things the past NFL season will be remembered for is some of the questionable refereeing decisions that were called. When one guy is raising his arms to call a touchdown and another is frantically waving his hands saying it was an incomplete pass, you know someone’s made a big mistake. Those decisions could be the difference between a team winning or losing, securing a place in the playoffs or their season ending abruptly. This is why coaches’ challenges are so important in football. They can allow a team to regain an advantage because the referees missed something. In many ways a challenge in football is no different to a business receiving an eDiscovery request.
Throwing the Challenge Flag
When a coach throws a red flag on the field in football, that’s his way of saying to the ref, ‘I think you got that one wrong’. The referee can’t then just review the play from memory; he needs some help. With the help of video replays, these decisions don’t take more than a minute. Can you imagine if video reviews were not readily available to referees and they had to trawl through hours of footage to find the right play? It would be pretty embarrassing and time-consuming for everyone involved. Games of football would take about 12 hours to play. This is no different to a business receiving an eDiscovery request and searching through their archives for the required file. Having an email archive policy and being able to fulfil an eDiscovery request in good time is like a referee reviewing a play and making a call with-in that one minute. It’s the efficient resolution we have come to expect.
The Ruling on the Field Stands
Once a play is reviewed the referee then steps out on to the field and announces his decision. We know that it will be the correct one as he has had all the equipment necessary to make that call. We can rely on the review, not because we can rely on the referee, but because we can rely on the video replays that are central to his decision. These video replays are as important to a football game as a good email archiving policy is to a business. If you can’t fulfil an eDiscovery request because you don’t have a good email archiving solution, you could end up looking as foolish a those two referees that don’t know a touchdown from an incomplete pass. The only difference is their decision costs a football team, where as your indecision with your email archiving policy will end up costing you
