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E-Discovery Snafu May Have Erased Enron E-Mail
Monica Bay at The Common Scold points to breaking news sure to shake up the world of electronic discovery. As Ben Hallman reports in The American Lawyer, the company handling electronic discovery in the Enron civil suits says a software glitch may have erased text in e-mails produced in the case over an 18-month span.
"Applied Discovery Inc., a Bellevue, Wash.–based division of LexisNexis, says one client has reported a problem so far. And lawyers handling the Enron litigation said it was too early to predict the potential impact. But several of the lawyers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that if the problem was widespread and had corrupted the discovery process, it could cost tens of millions of dollars to fix and could foul up both pending and settled Enron litigation."
So far, Hallman writes, no one is panicking -- although one wonders why not. Applied Discovery VP Scott Nagel tells Hallman that the problem is "pretty small in scale" and that it is working to come up with a fix. The glitch stems from Microsoft Outlook 2003, the report says. When it is used to open e-mails from earlier Outlook versions, some appear to be blank when they are not. Nagel calls the problem "a Microsoft issue," not e-discovery specific. But EDD consultant Craig Ball tells Hallman he is surprised that a leading e-discovery company would use Outlook to search e-mail. "Every vendor is responsible for the tools they select and deploy," Ball said.
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on August 10, 2006 at 02:08 PM | Permalink
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