AMD Claims Intel Inadvertently Destroyed Evidence in Antitrust Case

Marcus Yam writes "In an unpublished statement to the U.S. District Court of Delaware, AMD alleges Intel allowed the destruction of evidence in pending antitrust litigation. According to the opening letter of the AMD statement, 'Through what appears to be a combination of gross communication failures, an ill-conceived plan of document retention and lackluster oversight by outside counsel, Intel has apparently allowed evidence to be destroyed.'"

Re:Data Retention part is True

[$RANDOMLUSER]

That sounds reasonably "advertent" to me...
Almost like a policy of data loss.

YRO??

[adam613]

What, exactly, does this have to do with my rights online?

Poor AMD

[wolff000]

I am definitely an AMD CPU fan boy but the corp itself I have no loyalty too especially with stuff like this going on. I doubt few major corporations have a valid working archive of all emails sent and received. I worked for a decent size corp for years ,around 1500 employees with email, and server side we retained 7 days at the most. It would cost a ton and if the allegations are true in Intel's case wouldn't help to have those emails anyway. As stated earlier this is just typical lawyer tactics. It still leaves AMD in a not so great light.

Re:3007

[thedletterman]

Seriously, I've got nowhere near the capital that Intel has, but I have every official email ever sent through my mail servers. Our email policy is "Leave a copy of messages on the server" and "Remove from server when deleted from deleted items". Then they are told to keep official emails at least 30 days, and delete personal emails. Every week, a script archives the mail folders and every month those archives are backed up. I've had to go through emails three years old before to show details of discussions on projects. I think the Federal guidelines of keeping emails is definately smart for business. I hardly think it's worthwhile for ISPs to have to archive tons of spam. Fix the spam problem, and then maybe we'll talk.

Re:That is a bit silly

[Chris Burke]

Suggesting that the inability to search e-mail in legacy systems is "destruction of evidence" is more than a bit silly in my personal opinion.

Describing it as accidental destruction of evidence though is perfectly accurate, at least from a non-technical legal point of view.

"Through what appears to be a combination of gross communication failures, an ill-conceived plan of document retention and lackluster oversight by outside counsel, Intel has apparently allowed evidence to be destroyed."

That's pretty much what you're describing, right? Large organizations with completely inadequate data retention, which inevitably destroys data irrespective of that data's importance, in large degree because the company just doesn't have a solid plan in place? That's all AMD is alleging, that their system was inadequate to the task, not that Intel deliberately crippled their email system to lose emails they didn't want showing up during discovery. The fact that this isn't uncommon in email systems makes the argument more believable, not less.

If they were alleging deliberate destruction of evidence, that would be a whole different ball of wax.