Why IT sucks at being a law hound

When legal wrangling turns serious and lawyers send corporate IT departments a barrage of emails looking for information to use as evidence in an upcoming trial, the IT geeks often aren't up to the challenge.

"It seems like a simple exercise. Go to IT. They'll get the information and pass it on. It's actually much more complex than that," Maureen Duffy, national practice coordinator for legal firm Freehills, said at the Information Management and E-Discovery Summit yesterday in Sydney.

Just as few lawyers are technical gurus, very few IT employees have legal qualifications, making it difficult for them when it comes to recognising what's important. "Corporate IT is not really trained in what is legal evidence," Duffy said.

Additionally, most IT departments have infrastructure expertise, not the specific know-how required to find information on the corporate network.

One example of where evidence gathering went horribly wrong, according to Duffy, is a recent US patent dispute between mobile chipmakers Qualcomm and Broadcomm. Qualcomm failed to produce 46,000 emails related to the case when requested to deliver communications between it and a standards body, although it had managed to find 1.2 million other documents. The later discovery of the archived emails cost Qualcomm US$8.5 million and had six of its lawyers referred to the state bar of California.

It could have been intentional withholding of evidence, Duffy said, but it could equally just have been a failure in the process of finding electronic evidence.

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Source: zdnet.com.au
By: Suzzane Tindal