On 3/20/07, Stephen Cohen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Taking this thread a step further, what
> organizations/agencies/governments were so crippled by a loss of records
> or bad records practices that they either went our of business or nearly
> went out of business, and had a major impact on their
> industry/sector/society? (My knee-jerk answer to this question is
> Enron.)

actually Enron wasn't hampered by loss or records or bad records
practices but rather due to their financial shenanigans. Now Arthur
Andersen is a different story. They were hauled into court by the
Federales due to allegations of spoliation and obstruction of justice.
This resulted in the demise of Andersen as a viable entity even though
the Supremes recently threw out the convictions.

Another example would be the Frank Quattrone who was involved in the
financial services sector. Convicted of failing to retain records and
convincing colleagues to "shred away" I believe his conviction was
recently overturned

for dollar amount you can't beat the Coleman v Morgan Stanley case
where M-S certified to the judge that they had delivered all the
emails requested under a discovery order only to return to court a few
weeks later to tell the judge "oopsie, we found another 1200 email
backup tapes" The result was that the judge instructed the jury that
they could take an adverse judgement against M-S. they did and awarded
the plaintiffs (Coleman) $1.5 billion in compensatory and punitive
damages. The case is under appeal.

Prudential insurance (back in the 1990s) ran into trouble due to poor
recordkeeping (LarryM can provide more detailed info) but IIRC  the
judge appointed a special master to monitor Prudential

and one more. back in the late 80s early 90s the Federales were
investigating the paper companies for price collusion. Time was
running out on the investigation, the US investigators looked high and
low for the smoking gun. Until one day an individual said "check out
Mrs. Jones, she was Mr. X's executive secretary. She copies of
everything." so they subpoena'd her and discovered a treasure trove of
documents in her garage. And there was a diamond amongs the trove and
that diamond memorialized a luncheon conversation between Mr. X and
Mr. Y in which both gentlemen agreed to a particular  pricing
structure. Smoking Gun!

but one can't forget Microsoft and the 10 year's worth of emails they
had to turn over to the DOJ. Talk about treasures. one email was from
Mr. Gates in which he wrote "so tell me how can we scr*w Netscape?"

those are just a few that I disremember

pak

-- 
Peter Kurilecz CRM CA
Richmond, Va

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