In a primer on Electronic Discovery that I glanced at I read this
synopsis of a case:  I withheld the names of the companies involved.

 

Lawyers delegated the job of preserving electronic data to the in-house
IT staff and some unqualified consultants.  The court found that the
defendant had a duty to preserve all relevant evidence as of a certain
date the complaint was filed and ordered the defendant to preserve all
electronic evidence, all backup tapes and hard drives and 6 days of
email contained on hard drives and backup tapes.  The IT staff decided
it would take too much time to (15 days) and with counsel' s approval
tasked the company's outsourced IT provider to take a snapshot of the
data on the company's email system as of a later date.  IT staff failed
to inform the outsourcing staff to preserve any emails on backup tapes
and so only existing email (active data) were preserved.  Unwittingly
the backup tapes of the emails needing to be preserved in the first
place were overwritten by this outsourcing staff.  The court found that
the counsel of the defendant had failed to have any meaningful
discussions with the outsourcing company.

 

Interesting due to our recent discussions on email, the court could had
found other things to litigate on from the active emails.

 

Ms. Laura F. Bell

DOT Directives & Records Management

Office of the Secretary of Transportation

[log in to unmask]

202-366-9761

 


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