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Marcus Yam writes "In an unpublished statement to the U.S. District Court of Delaware, AMD alleges Intel allowed the destruction of evidence in pending antitrust litigation.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.'"

That is a bit silly

[sphealey]

Historically e-mail systems were never designed for intensive archiving and ad-hoc searching across the database. In fact, even the current generation of systems require bolt-on archivers to meet the new federal evidence requirements. And I talk to people every day at very large entities that are still using Outlook Express, local mailbox storage, and have no usable archiving system.

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.

sPh

Data Retention part is True

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at Intel and the retention policy is VERY short on sent items and equally short for all the other mail folders in the inbox. I hear of people losing emails all the time because of this. Hell, I have lost a few sent emails myself. Also, from what I heard (from friends in IT) that we only keep a backup of 7 days of all the exchange server data only for disaster/worst case scenario reasons.

don't be fooled

[sharp-bang]

The claim of poor retention is increasingly a stock claim made by plaintiff's lawyers. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure increasingly place a discovery burden on all organizations. Anything and everything electronically stored is subject to electronic discovery, and if you don't have a retention policy that deals with what is subject to discovery when litigation is "reasonably foreseeable", you can be sure the opposing attorneys will point that out, even if it is BS.

Intel acknowledges losing docs

[strike6]

This isn't an allegation. Intel has acknowledged losing documents. URL:http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/bus iness/16843055.htm

Not all email

[erbmjw]

It's not all email from all Intel employees that must be retained

1027 case-specific individuals at Intel were identified and from 2005 case initiation date Intel is supposed to have all of their email retained; of these 1027 case-specific persons AMD is allowed to stipulate 471 for court scrutiny of data.

These employees, dubbed "custodians," are persons of interest in the legal proceedings.

Re:Poor AMD - RTA

[erbmjw]

The court instructed Intel to retain all email for 1027 case-specific individuals from the data of case initiation ie 2005.

This has nothing to do with leaving AMD in a not so great light; but it does have everything to do with Intel not properly following court orders - Intel even admitted they screwed up!

Re:Data Retention part is True

[cmacb]

That's exactly what it is. My last months with a large government contractor they had numerous meetings with employees to inform them that they were *not* too retain e-mail, even in private caches. They made it clear that the issue was *not* storage space, admin overhead or anything such as that. They were very open in saying that they wanted the e-mail trail gone in case of a lawsuit. Individuals found hording their own copy of e-mail could be terminated with no prior warning. This was before "Sarbox", so I'm not sure if things have changed since (I certainly hope so!)

Re:Plausible Deliability

[Ungrounded Lightning]

When you merely fail to meet your obligation to stop destruction, you're not liable. Just ask New Orleans about Bush/Brown/Chertoff/FEMA.

Actually, ask them about Governor Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin.

Making the disaster plan, and executing the plan for the first three days WITHOUT external help, was the responsibility of the locality. FEMA assistance wasn't supposed to be counted on until the fourth day - and even then it's just materiel and money to HELP the state and locality run THEIR plan, not a federal takeover of their responsibilities.

Guess what day they showed up?

Under the Posse Comitatus act the fed can't even send in people without permission from the governor (or a declaration of war against a rebellion). (That's why they gave a bunch of supplies to groups like the Salvation Army to take in - groups which the local officials then blocked from going to the area.)