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Letters Debate E-Discovery Snafu

Monica Bay continues to cover the e-discovery snafu that may have compromised electronic discovery in the Enron litigation, as first reported last week by Ben Hallman in The American Lawyer. On Friday, Bay posted a letter responding to the article from Scott Nagel, vice president and managing director of LexisNexis Applied Discovery, the company at the center of the report. In it, Nagel addresses what he sees as factual errors in the original report. For one,  he says, the so-called bug in Microsoft Outlook 2003 did not erase anything.

"No data was lost as a result of this bug. It did not erase anything but simply caused the text of e-mails to not be displayed. The data is present and can be viewed by applying Microsoft's patch to address the error."

The problem, Nagel adds, affected less than .01 percent of Enron e-mails.

Bay also conveys further thoughts from EDD consultant Craig Ball -- who was quoted in the original article -- in the form of his letter to Marc Osborn, a member of the LexisNexis PR staff. In response to a LexisNexis statement suggesting that Microsoft did not patch the Outlook bug until the September 2005 release of Service Pack 2, Ball writes:

"In fact, the Microsoft Outlook Hotfix to resolve this issue was (per Microsoft's website) released on January 7, 2004 and the issue involving blank Outlook e-mails was also addressed by a patch in the July 27, 2004 MS Office 2003 Service Pack 1. ...

"It's no doubt technically accurate to say that the fix was also carried forward into Service Pack 2 in 2005, but don't you want to be forthcoming about the two prior patches that would have solved the problem, perhaps as much as eighteen months earlier?"

Time will tell whether this problem could easily have been avoided, says legal technology consultant Ron Friedmann, but in the meantime, "it’s a good lesson that litigators and lit supp managers should make sure the tools they use work appropriately."

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on August 14, 2006 at 05:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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