Ouch! Missing e-mails get company socked with big fine
July 28, 2009 by Sam NarisiPosted in: Regulations & Compliance, Special Report
While navigating the electronic discovery rules put into effect in 2006 can still be murky, one thing is clear:
Failing to adequately comply with discovery requests is a costly mistake. Take this recent lawsuit:
In 2007, Dell Computer was sued over an alleged misappropriation of funds related to a surveillance camera system developed for the city of New Orleans. The suit claimed Dell was part of a conspiracy to fraudulently sell the system.
A key component of the case was whether Michael Dell personally knew about the supposedly shady deal. To figure that out, plaintiffs’ attorneys filed a discovery request asking Dell to turn over all relevant e-mails.
What Dell provided didn’t please the plaintiffs or the court. Despite turning over more than 160,000 pages of documents, Dell was accused of dragging its feet and performing a “piecemeal” production of information, the Associated Press reports.
The major charge: Dell failed to use specific keyword searches to find relevant e-mails. For example, the opposition’s lawyers pointed out that Dell didn’t include a search for the word “camera” in Michael Dell’s e-mail.
The judge agreed and found the company in contempt of court, saying it had made a “mockery” of the system and calling its actions “unconscionable.” In addition to the tongue-lashing, the court fined Dell $25,000 in sanctions. The judge ordered the company to conduct a search using specific keywords.
The lesson: Lawsuits can come from any direction and for a variety of causes, and an increasing number will require e-discovery. Companies need the capability to quickly find relevant documents and turn them over in a timely manner. In addition to protecting data according to a retention policy, the documents should be searchable using flexible search terms.
Cite: Active Solutions, LLC and Southern Electronics Supply, Inc. v. Dell, Inc.
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July 29th, 2009 at 8:51 am
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July 29th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Token sanctions are not enough incentive to change behavior, Sam. A $25k fine for Dell accomplishes absolutely nothing at all.
The inconsequential sanction itself is a mockery of our judicial system.
August 12th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Honestly, I am guessing that the judge has never been through the process of having to parse through TB and TB of info. Most people forget that storage space (esp on backups) is not large enough to accomodate the amount of documentation/emails/logs/files that are produced each day/week/month/year.
Let’s say the company uses Exchange Server for email, and Backup Exec for backing up those emails.
The largest mailbox size that a user can have is 75gb (Exchange 2003), but unless you have the funds to purchase a powerful server, most admins will limit that size to way less than that, otherwise users complain of slow/laggy email delivery/use.
This leaves users to either
1. Delete Emails – This means the email doesn’t exist currently on the Exchange server. If the user didn’t make a copy of the email in an archive somewhere, then the IT Dept has to restore from backup.
The issue with restoring from backup is that it IS a time consuming process. Backup Exec doesn’t allow you to search the backups for specific words located in email. You have to restore the emails in order to do the search.
However, there are going to be more emails than what the mailbox can hold, so you have to restore the emails in chunks (generally by date range), search through those emails, get rid of the emails that are not relevant (don’t need to include the emails where you were telling your best friend that you got your wife a camera for Christmas), print the ones that are, lather, rinse, repeat.
Not too bad if you are just looking at the past 2 weeks of emails, but the longer date range being parsed, is the longer amount of time it will be to try to restore info.
2. Archive off emails.
If they archive off emails to PST files, then they are limited to a 2GB limit, before having to create a new PST file. Now the IT department has to restore every PST file for the user, before they can do the search. That means you have to locate the media (tape/hard drive/CD) that has the PST file on it, mount it, inventory it, find the file you want to restore, and start the restore process.
To put this into perspective, we backup about 50gb worth of data every night (and that is because we only backup what has changed). It takes 2.5 hours to backup that much data. Depending on where you are restoring to, generally speaking, restore takes 2x-3x as long to process, which means that restoring 50gb for one night would take 5-7.5 hours just to get the files/emails to a state where you could start a search.
We are a small company (<100 employees). I can’t imagine how much data that Dell backs up every night…..and goodness, where in the heck would they store it all? At 50GB each night, a 1 TB hard drive would fill up in no time (assuming you never overwrote the data on the backups).
I think people making decisions about a timely manner/method on discovery need to understand the process before blindly making judgements.
January 5th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
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