Fenty administration routinely destroyed government e-mails

The Fenty administration routinely destroyed official e-mails, throwing thousands of public records into the electronic garbage pile even as the city council was drafting legislation that would have prevented it, a top city official has admitted under oath.

In late 2007, Mayor Adrian Fenty tried to give himself the authority to destroy electronic records every eight weeks. After hearing months of outrage from government watchdog groups and facing emergency legislation that would have forbidden the practice, Fenty announced that he was withdrawing the proposal early last year.

But the administration was destroying the records every two months until at least May 2008, Office of the Chief Technology Officer program officer Robert Mancini said in a recent affidavit obtained by The Examiner.

“Because there is no retention schedule for e-mails for the District of Columbia government and because of cost and storage considerations, it was the general practice of OCTO to retain backup tapes [of e-mails] for [a] period of 8 weeks, after which the tapes were recycled and copied over,” Mancini wrote in the June 15 affidavit.

D.C. policy caps the number of e-mails in a worker’s inbox. An e-mail deleted from an inbox is still preserved on backup digital tapes. Once the tapes are erased, the e-mail is gone. D.C. law has long defined e-mails as public records but hasn’t been clear about how long they should be preserved.

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Source: Washington Examiner
By: Bill Myers

Managing The Law Department With A Tighter Budget: How Integrating Legal Research And Litigation Tools Improves Risk Management

Readers of The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel will recall an article in last month's issue by my colleague, Marcus Linden, which explained how the era in which in-house law departments were somewhat insulated from the effects of economic cycles has officially passed. Legal chiefs today are more pressed than ever to control legal costs, a task made more daunting because of increased government regulations and litigation workloads.

This set of circumstances has been discussed for a while now in anecdotes shared by in-house counsel, but recent studies have actually benchmarked the fact that the pressure to "do more with less" is now a reality for many in-house law departments. For example, a recent LexisNexis CounselLink study conducted by Corporate Counsel and published by Incisive Media found that 68 percent of in-house legal professionals feel pressure to reduce the law department budget, and a majority of them have already experienced actual reductions in total budgets (58.9 percent). Another 2009 study, conducted by consulting firm Lexakos, found that 40 percent of legal departments expected a decrease in their overall operating budget for 2009, compared to only 8 percent last year.

So faced with the reality of tighter budgets, how can in-house counsel figure out a way to fulfill their primary business responsibility of minimizing risk while reducing their costs during these challenging economic times? Clearly, there is no single answer to this dilemma, but one specific technology-driven strategy that many progressive law departments are embracing is the integration of online legal research with robust litigation support tools.

Litigation As A Business Endeavor

At first glance, the integration of legal research with litigation tools might seem an unlikely business strategy for corporate law departments seeking to do more with less, but the legal industry has clearly seen a shift in recent years toward business-driven strategies to more effectively manage dispute resolution.

In a broad sense, most corporations are built around processes and continuous process improvement. That mindset and framework is now being applied to corporate law departments and moving downstream to law firms as well - and for good reason. Litigation is more than an area of practice within the legal profession; it is a business endeavor that can have a profound impact on the financial health of a corporation. As a result, corporate executives are increasingly expecting a project management-style approach from their in-house legal departments when it comes to their oversight of the litigation portfolio.

At LexisNexis, we are now seeing a surge of interest among corporations interested in putting processes in place to gain greater control and insight early and throughout the litigation process. This trend from viewing litigation as a practice to viewing it as a business process is an important one to monitor.

The fact is that many departments are unaware of just how disconnected their various litigation processes are right now. Consider just a few examples and the extent to which they are integrated in your organization:

Conducting early case assessment;

Investigating witnesses and experts;

Researching case law;

Capturing and culling document collections; and

Reviewing and producing documents.

There are some important in-house law department areas of daily responsibility in which an integration of these litigation and research processes can yield substantial risk management benefits for the organization.

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Source: Metropolitan Corporate Counsel
By: Craig Bennett

Wrestling With International E-Discovery: The Sedona Conference® Looks To Bring Dialogue To A Longstanding Challenge In International Law

In 2001 prior to the e-discovery explosion I had the opportunity to take an international law class covering the law of the sea, piracy, Antarctica and other global legal considerations with Professor Chris Joyner, Director of International Law and Politics at Georgetown University. Professor Joyner's final exam included an essay question that asked the class to compare and contrast domestic law and international law in the context of wrestling. Domestic law with its executive powers of enforcement was most similar to Olympic wrestling. The rules are well defined, clearly adopted and those who break the rules understand the punishment.

Alternatively, professional wrestling with its lack of centralized power and weak enforcement often leads participants to loosely partner until the rules no longer suit them. When the battle at hand becomes a test of survival or victory, the laws, treaties and loose agreements tend to crumble. Similar situations are occurring with regard to international data protection, privacy and disclosure worldwide, especially when U.S. litigants are involved.

Nowhere is this example more prominent than in the case of In re Advocat "Christopher X." As has been well documented by The Sedona Conference® and others, the defendant in the case, Credit Lyonnais, argued that it would be in violation of French law to execute a discovery request. The U.S. courts found French courts had historically not enforced blocking statutes and chose to order the discovery assuming that the French would not enforce their laws. Christopher X entered the ring of international e-discovery and quickly became the center of an elaborate spectacle that put U.S discovery laws at odds with French data privacy and protection laws. Suddenly legal wrangling about data privacy and protection had become more than just a show. Real criminal charges had been filed, and the reality that a workable and practical way forward was necessary became ever more apparent.

The Sedona Conference® recently endeavored to help clarify this ongoing international conflict by hosting an event focused on Cross-Border e-Discovery, e-Disclosure and Data Privacy Conflicts in Barcelona, Spain. This conference featured two days of blue-ribbon panel discussions and dialogue that included a number of international data privacy commissioners, judges and attorneys. In addition, this event saw the launch of the latest Sedona publication. The Sedona International Overview on E-Discovery, Data Privacy and Disclosure Requirements was released to the Sedona membership and will be available for public comment in July.

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Source: Metropolitan Corporate Counsel
By: Sean Regan

Cutting Your e-Discovery Costs

One of the biggest beefs companies have with corporate litigation has been the rise in discovery costs, especially as Corporate America has entered the electronic era and creates exponentially more information to search. But many times, it’s the lawyers themselves who make the process more expensive than it needs to be.

That was the message expressed by federal magistrate Judge Robert Collings, who spoke recently at the IQPC Corporate Litigation Exchange. He noted that misunderstandings over e-discovery arise when opposing sides attempt to guess at the scope of a dispute, rather than coming to an agreement and sticking to it. The result, he said, is that parties take their best guesses at what the other side wants—and fail, leading to time-consuming and costly pre-trial hearings and disputes.

A better approach is for lawyers to resolve the issues among themselves and then come to the court with solutions, an approach that would be “embraced by judges,” says Rick Wolf, CEO of legal consulting firm Lexakos.

As Collings pointed out, many magistrates would be more than happy to help settle the scope of a dispute. What really gets under their skin is refereeing each side’s decisions after those choices have been made.

That’s where the growing role of mediators in e-discovery disputes is coming into play, driven in part by 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Rule 29, in particular, gives opposing sides the leeway to set their own discovery rules, which has given rise to “a whole additional cottage industry of consultants,” says John Watkins of law firm Chorey, Taylor & Feil, and a registered mediator with the Georgia Office of Dispute Resolution.

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Source: Compliance Week
By: Jaclyn Jaeger

Don't Let Legacy Media Foil Your Forensic Investigation

When performing incident response and forensics on a compromised system, the focus of analysis is on the most immediately available and relevant sources of evidence. Volatile data collected from a running system, the hard drive, network flow data and logs collected on a central server all serve as useful sources for determining the particulars of the incidents. But what about incidents that go back further requiring you to dig into backup tapes, potentially very old ones?

Fortunately, I've dealt with very few cases where I had to retrieve information from backup tapes, however, none of them have been pretty. The last time was the worst one because the tapes were the best source of evidence thanks to the botched first response by the client's sysadmins. Making matters worse, the client used an expensive and proprietary backup software that only they could use to extract the data for analysis. Oh yeah, and it was brutally slow.

The article, "Computer Forensics - Don't Let the Tape Evidence Escape You," is what started me thinking about tapes and moreover, legacy media and its impact on computer forensic investigations. Unless they've been at it for a very long time, independent forensic investigators unlikely to have an arsenal of legacy tape, magneto-optical, Zip disk and other drives at their beck and call when needed in an investigation. They either have to rely on their client to have the right drives or call a specialty shop that has the right drives to read the data for them--which luckily, those places do exist.

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Source: darkreading.com
By: John Sawyer

Why Email Matters – The Science Behind the US Attorney Scandal

Email is more and more in the news these days, is near the center of the current US Attorney firing scandal, and for good reason. A substantial amount of communication flows via email, which can be an efficient form of communicating memos and other intercourse. Email is nearly instantaneous, costs almost nothing, and has in large part replaced the paper memo. Email provides for a path of inquiry that previously was unavailable to investigators for a paper document can be shredded or burned while email leaves a trail even when deleted. Furthermore, unlike a piece of paper, the email itself reveals who sent it and who received it, when and where. As Senator Patrick Leahy says (quoted by Michael Abramowitz on April 14, 2007 in 4 years of Rove e-mails are missing, GOP admits) “You can’t erase e-mails, not today?They’ve gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there ?? There are primarily three kinds of email in common use. One is the email client program, a genre that includes Microsoft Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, Macintosh Mail, and Netscape Mail. The second type is the prevalent Microsoft Outlook, a very different program from the same company?s Outlook Express. The third is commonly known as web mail or Internet mail.

Email client programs store data mostly in text form – words people understand, as distinct from cryptic computer language. In general, all of the individual emails in a single mailbox (such as the ?In??or ?Sent??mailboxes) are stored together as a single file.

When mail is deleted, it is truncated from the mailbox file, but its data is not actually removed from the computer at this point. Each file has an entry in an index that is something like a table of contents. When an entire mailbox is deleted, part of its entry the file index is removed, but the actual body of the file does not disappear from the computer. The area on the computer?s hard disk that holds the file gets marked as available to be reused, but the file?s contents may not get overwritten, and hence may be recoverable for some time, if at all.
The computer forensics specialist may then search the ostensibly unused portion of the computer for text that may have been part of an email. The expert can look for names, phrases, places, or actions that might have been mentioned in an email. The email contains internal data that tells where it has been and who it has been to.

For instance, I just sent my wife a 17-word message entitled, ?Where?s this email from???She replied, ?Darling, Surely you must mean, “From where is this email?” Love, Your grammatically correct wife.??- 15 word reply. Yet when I look underneath what is displayed on the screen, I see the email actually contained 246 words. Where did it all come from?

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Source: articlesalad.com
By: Steve Burgess

Remote Wrap-Up of LTWC 2009

If you had been looking for me at LegalTech in Los Angeles, I'm afraid I disappointed you. I did not make the trip this year, but I monitored developments at the the show for new products and observed how established products and services renewed themselves. One thing I was quite sure about: The show went on without me.

NON-EDD UPDATES

At the last LegalTech show in New York, I met Ken Lopez of Law Prospector. He educated me on litigation support sales teams and business development teams for law firms. Those niche markets are probably not newsworthy for many of you, but read between the lines. Gone are the days when a legal service sells itself -- if there were ever days like that.

Today, you need to market, market and market your services to obtain and retain clients. And that’s where Law Prospector comes in. It claims a view to the current and future litigation services of thousands of attorneys, hundreds of law firms and thousands of corporate in-house counsel. And now, you can bring that view with you on your BlackBerry, iPhone or Windows Mobile device to get sales leads wherever you go -- with network connectivity, of course.

Deadlines on Demand, a wholly owned subsidiary of CompuLaw, launched a completely redesigned Web site that sports brand-new features to communicate deadlines to clients, customize results and maintain dynamic calendars. The lowdown on the highlights include: automatic Microsoft Outlook integration and synchronization; graphical calendar views by month, week and day; "my cases" tool to manage cases; ability to easily move deadlines and related dates if calendars need adjustment; and automatic integration with time and billing systems.

LegalTech is known for "firsts." In that tradition, Face to Face Live (with LifeSize Communications) debuted "Desktop Pro," an HD videoconferencing system that can be leased for $399 per month per location that incudes all equipment, installation, training and a fully managed service. The system is designed for home or business offices and includes a 22-inch monitor and a LifeSize Express unit with a camera mounted inside. The monitor can be used for HD videoconferencing, as well as a PC interface. Now, if FTFL could have told me the difference between telepresence and HD videoconferencing, I know I missed something at LegalTech.

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Source: law.com
By: Sean Doherty

E-mails can jeopardize your job, the Mark Sanford scandal shows

If ever there was a reminder to be cautious with e-mails, it came this week as romantic missives from South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to his Argentine lover surfaced in the national press.

Sanford, a conservative Republican who disappeared for several days to rendezvous with his lover in Argentina, returned to the United States on Wednesday to find out his tryst had been exposed in the media, along with months' worth of steamy electronic exchanges between the couple.

"I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curves of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself . . . in the faded glow of night's light," one of Sanford's messages read. "But hey, that would be going into sexual details."

The State, a South Carolina newspaper which first published the correspondence, said it received the e-mails anonymously as early as December of last year. They appeared to come from a personal e-mail account belonging to Sanford rather than a government-related account, according to the paper.

Sanford is now battling for his job as some constituents call for his resignation.

How the anonymous source obtained the e-mails and whether that source violated any laws in doing so isn't clear. What is clear, experts said, is that anyone using e-mail, text messages and other forms of electronic communication that can zip around the globe in seconds should simply assume that the whole world is reading.

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Source: latimes.com
By: Tiffany Hsu

You Get What You Pay For: Court Allows Access to Defendant's Relevant Backup Tapes and Email Archives provided Plaintiff is Willing to Bear the Costs

Kilpatrick v. Breg, Inc., 2009 WL 1764829 (S.D. Fla. June 22, 2009)

This case arose from plaintiff’s claim that defendant’s product caused plaintiff to develop a degenerative cartilage condition (chondrolysis), that defendant was aware of the risk of such a condition, and that defendant is therefore liable for plaintiff’s damages resulting from the condition. In the course of discovery, plaintiff became concerned that defendant’s production of electronic discovery was incomplete and filed a motion to compel. Acknowledging the validity of plaintiff’s concern but noting the unlikely possibility that any material new documents were located in defendant’s email archives or on disaster recovery tapes, the court concluded that plaintiff may, but was not required to, hire an outside vendor “for the purpose of confirming the completeness of [defendant’s] production, at is own expense” subject to specific conditions enumerated by the court.

In response to plaintiff’s discovery requests, defendant objected to searching “archived electron [sic] records” stating that “responsive documents include ‘internal email communications which may be held by [defendant] in disaster recovery back up storage [, which] is not reasonably accessible, and plaintiff is unable to demonstrate the need and relevance that outweigh the costs of retrieving and processing.’” Additionally, throughout the course of litigation, defendant repeatedly assured plaintiff that it was not necessary to conduct “in-depth” discovery of archived materials because “any relevant information could be gleaned through employee depositions and the notebooks that they kept which contained printed versions of any germane materials.” In the course of discovery certain documents were discovered indicating that defendant’s knowledge of the relevant risks of its product may have existed earlier than originally represented by defendant’s employees at deposition. That evidence, combined with “certain purported irregularities in [defendant’s] production of electronic discovery” lead plaintiff to believe that relevant documents existed that had not been produced. Accordingly, plaintiff filed his motion to compel.

The court agreed that the record indicated the existence of responsive documents that had not been produced and noted that the omission of suspected relevant but undisclosed material was “especially glaring” considering defendant’s assurances that any relevant information could be gleaned through employee depositions and other materials. Despite acknowledging the possibility of the existence of additional responsive information, the court indicated the need to limit plaintiff’s relief in light of the questionable likelihood that the information sought would be found in the email archives or on the disaster recovery tapes (and the questionable value of such information in light of the timing of plaintiff’s claim) and the inability to accomplish the requested searches so close in time to trial.

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Source: ediscoverylaw.com

Judge finds Dell Inc. in contempt

A state court judge on Thursday found Dell Inc. in contempt of court, saying the computer company was making a "mockery" of the system with its alleged piecemeal production of documents in a civil lawsuit over New Orleans' crime camera system.

Judge Rosemary Ledet also ordered Texas-based Dell to pay $25,000 in sanctions. Plaintiffs' attorneys had requested nearly $182,000 in fees and expenses.

Dell attorney Phillip Wittmann disputed claims that the company was dragging its feet and playing games in discovery, saying that more than 160,000 pages of documents have been produced, e-mail and other information has been handed over as it's been uncovered and that the company has been acting in good faith.

But Ledet called the company's conduct "unconscionable," after hearing arguments from plaintiffs' attorneys that searches using such keywords as "camera" were not done for e-mail and other documents that may have been sent to or by Dell executives, including Chief Executive Michael Dell.

Plaintiffs' attorney Gladstone Jones said he "wasted my time" in Texas last week for Michael Dell's deposition because of the quality of the records' search.

Ledet ordered a search using specific words and said the sides can discuss how to proceed if the search yields a huge amount of records. She did not order that depositions, like Michael Dell's, be taken again.

Southern Electronics Supply Inc. and Active Solutions LLC sued in 2007, claiming the surveillance system they developed was misappropriated by people within and with ties to the city's technology department. They also allege a conspiracy with Dell to sell the system.

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Source: ap.google.com
By: BECKY BOHRER

Investigating Personal Web-Based E-Mail

You are in-house counsel at a public company and you suspect an employee may be leaking inside information. You decide to conduct an internal investigation. A computer forensic analysis reveals that the employee has accessed a personal Web-based e-mail account from a company computer and that the login information (username and password) has been recovered from the computer's memory. Can you log in to that account and read the e-mail?

Unlike an employer's internal e-mail system, which is generally understood to be under the ownership and control of the employer, personal Web-based accounts accessed at work raise new and unsettled questions about an employee's expectations of privacy. A computer that accesses a Web-based account -- such as an e-mail account, social networking Web site or instant messaging service -- merely provides a window into an account that is physically stored elsewhere. Information viewed or created using a company computer may be accessible without logging in to the account by accessing "temporary Internet files" on the company's computer, and is therefore arguably fair game to review. Other information in the account that was not viewed or created from a company computer, however, is likely only accessible by logging in and exploring the Web-based account. How far can you go?

LIABILITY UNDER THE STORED COMMUNICATIONS ACT

A significant risk you face if you exceed your authorized access to an employee's Web-based account is liability under the Stored Communications Act. The SCA creates a criminal offense and civil liability for whoever "intentionally accesses without authorization a facility through which an electronic communication service is provided" or "intentionally exceeds an authorization to access that facility" and by doing so "obtains, alters or prevents authorized access to a wire or electronic communication while it is in electronic storage in such system." 18 U.S.C. §2701. The SCA has been used to prosecute e-mail hackers in the past -- such as the college student who allegedly hacked into Sarah Palin's e-mail account -- and there is also a portion of the statute which creates a private cause of action through which a plaintiff can recover damages, including punitive damages if the violation "is willful or intentional." 18 U.S.C. §2707(c).

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Source: law.com
By: Marjorie J. Peerce and Daniel V. Shapiro

Missing files leave lawyers for Basi, Virk in disbelief

The loss of thousands of cabinet and executive branch e-mails concerning the biggest privatization deal in British Columbia's history is so shocking that defence lawyers in a politically charged trial still can't believe it has happened.

Both inside and outside the Supreme Court of B.C. yesterday, lawyers were expressing disbelief that e-mails from 2001 to 2005 related to the $1-billion sale of BC Rail could have been purged from the government's data system while a trial concerning the deal was before the courts.

“At the moment, our view is that these must be recoverable,” said Michael Bolton, who, together with other defence attorneys, has sent a letter to the government's lawyer asking for a detailed explanation of how a data search was done.

“We don't accept at face value that these things have been lost … because e-mails are recoverable as long as there are backup or storage tapes,” Mr. Bolton said.

Court was told on Monday that e-mails being sought by the lawyers defending three former provincial employees – Dave Basi, Bob Virk and Aneal Basi – are not recoverable because the government doesn't keep electronic backup tapes more than 13 months.

Wiped out, according to George Copley, a lawyer representing the B.C. Executive Council, are four years of tapes covering the crucial period when the government negotiated the sale of BC Rail to CN Rail.

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Source: The Globe and Mail
By: Mark Hume

The Cost of Information Misgovernance, and What You Can Do about IT

Information governance — historically a bottom-up practice and now the responsibility of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) managers — has been pushing its way into boardrooms around the world. Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, The Basel II accords and similar regulations have triggered this trend. The problem is that the concerned parties rarely speak the same technical language. Modern enterprise information management systems are helping to address the problem but there are still a few secrets to success. Here are some things to keep in mind during your initiatives.

The terms “corporate governance” and “information governance” no doubt sound similar. Many people focus only on the “governance” aspect of both, and assume that they are different names for the same discipline.

But for too long those who specialize in both fields have paid too little attention to each other — a disinterest that courts and regulators are now forcing to an end. Corporate governance — the role of boards and top management in overseeing, administering and monitoring a company, is very much of a “top-down” field. Information governance, which oversees the performance and risk management of information technology (IT) systems, would seem to be a very “bottom-up,” tactical item at the bottom of a board’s agenda. Yet IT and data management have been pushing their way up on that boardroom agenda for some time.

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Source: CMS Wire
By: Betsy Atkins

A Trans-Atlantic Look at E-Discovery

E-discovery (as it is referred to in the U.S.) or, more accurately, e-disclosure (as it is referred to here, post the Woolf reforms), has received very negative press, mainly due to the huge costs associated with it. But, when all is said and done, is it really that bad?

In examining this question, we must distinguish between the position in the U.S. and here in England and Wales. Either side of the Atlantic, parties will go through similar steps to preserve, retrieve, process and review their electronic documents. However, U.S. courts have imposed headline-making sanctions in a few cases where the discovery process of electronic documents has gone awry and resulting material has been damaged, compromised or gone missing altogether. In these cases, the punitive damages awarded have dwarfed the level of compensatory damages awarded for the substantive claim.

Although I am not suggesting that parties to litigation in this jurisdiction should take their disclosure obligations lightly, our courts will not subject parties to significant direct financial sanction. However, where there has been a deliberate attempt to suppress, omit or damage discloseable material, or where litigants do not abide by their disclosure obligations, they can, of course, still expect to suffer damage to reputation, should the court take them to task on their conduct, or to incur the cost of repeating the disclosure exercise. The court can also draw adverse inferences in respect of any damaged or missing material, which could have a profound effect on a party's prospect of success at trial.

There are other differences between the U.S. rules and our rules, from which litigating parties here can take comfort:

1. The starting point for U.S. litigants tends to be that metadata is relevant. Given the fragile nature of metadata, this has the impact of increasing the need to ensure it remains unchanged during the retrieval and review stages of the discovery process. It also means that, in many cases, it is necessary for U.S. litigants to engage the services of forensic computer experts to assist with the process.

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Source: law.com
By: Vince Neicho

Fake emails: how easy are they ... to spot or make?

With Utegate and that fake email occupying so much of our parliamentarians' time, just how easy is it to dupe someone?

Fake emails flood Australian inboxes every day but digital forensics experts say they can be easy to spot - or create, if you know the tricks.

Using a regular email program, fraudsters can create emails that appear to come from any address they want in a few minutes, said Graham Thompson, a digital forensics consultant who assists in police investigations.

Scammers use the same tricks to fool victims into thinking emails are coming from their bank, or from a friend who urgently needs money transferred to a bank account after being mugged abroad.

The trick in exposing what's fake or real, Thompson explained, is to obtain an electronic copy of the email and look at the "internet headers".

These can be revealed by clicking on email options in the program you use. They will reveal the real email and IP addresses used to send the message.

"I can make an account that says joebloggs@parliament.gov.au on the 'from' field, but it doesn't mean when you reply that it's going to go back to that address, and it doesn't mean it's from that address," Thompson said.

"I can send you an email now that basically says I'm your boss, but unless you look at the header of it to see it's actually coming from a separate account and a separate IP address, you wouldn't know.

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Source: brisbanetimes.com.au

By: Asher Moses

Four years of B.C. cabinet e-mails erased

The provincial government may have destroyed all cabinet e-mails between 2001 and 2005, opening a huge gap in the official record despite a law that electronic files must be kept for at least seven years, the Supreme Court of British Columbia has learned.

Michael Bolton, who is defending one of three former government employees in a political corruption case stemming from the sale of BC Rail, said outside court Monday he was stunned to hear the e-mails aren't available.

“This is troubling…this potentially is a very serious matter. We never expected this,” said Mr. Bolton, who is defending Dave Basi, who was a ministerial aid in 2003 when the government sold BC Rail to CN Rail for $1-billion. The controversial deal, which was the first big privatization undertaken by the B.C. Liberals, closed in 2004.

In an application filed two weeks ago defence lawyers sought the disclosure of the e-mail records of several members of cabinet, key executives, and of Premier Gordon Campbell, from June, 2001 to 2005.

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Source: www.theglobeandmail.com
By: Mark Hume

Computer forensics coming into its own as civil litigation tool

The recent battle between St. Paul’s Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis Star Tribune is a prime example of how important computer forensics have become in civil litigation.

In March 2007, shortly after Par Ridder left his job as publisher of the Pioneer Press to become publisher and CEO of the Star Tribune, allegations arose that he had taken confidential financial data with him to his new job.

Computer forensics expert Mark Lanterman, who was hired to examine Star Tribune and Pioneer Press computers and storage devices, determined that files had in fact been transferred from Ridder’s Pioneer Press laptop to Star Tribune computers. A Ramsey County District Court judge later mandated that Ridder step down.

The information gleaned through the use of computer forensics was central to the lawsuit, as it made it almost impossible for Ridder to deny what had occurred.

“It was certainly a help there,” said Leonard Street and Deinard attorney Daniel Oberdorfer, one of the lawyers for the Pioneer Press. Computer forensics “is fascinating and can provide you with a ton of useful information.”

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Source: finance-commerce.com
By: Michelle Lore

Court Finds Request Overly Broad and Unduly Burdensome and Denies Motion to Compel but Orders Search of Electronically Stored Information According

Kay Beer Distrib., Inc. v. Energy Brands, Inc., 2009 WL 1649592 (E.D. Wis. June 10, 2009)

Following the court’s award of partial summary judgment to defendant, the sole cause of action remaining was plaintiff’s claim for breach of an oral agreement. In support of that claim, plaintiff sought to compel the production of five DVDs containing the results of defendant’s search for potentially responsive electronically stored information ("ESI") referencing plaintiff, including emails. Because of the broad nature of defendant’s search, the DVDs contained some information that was privileged or otherwise non-discoverable. Defendant opposed the request as overly broad and unduly burdensome “given the narrow issues remaining in the case.” Moreover, defendant had previously produced responsive ESI, including ESI contained on the DVDs. The court denied plaintiff’s motion to compel. Having denied the motion, the court nonetheless recognized defendant’s obligation to “conduct reasonable searches” to respond to plaintiff’s discovery requests and ordered defendant to conduct additional searching of the ESI at issue as instructed by the court.

Despite defendant’s prior production of responsive ESI, plaintiff sought access to defendant’s DVDs for purposes of verifying production of all responsive information. As the court noted, “[i]n effect, [plaintiff] has demanded every email or ESI in which its name or some variation thereof appears.” Opposing plaintiff’s request, defendant argued that production of the DVDs would be unduly burdensome in light of the need to have its attorneys review the contents “to ensure that only nonprivileged and discoverable information was provided.” The cost of attorney time alone was estimated at almost $120,000.

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Source: ediscoverylaw.com

Legal Technology Experts and Law Firm Leaders to Converge On

Incisive Media's LegalTech West Coast conference, the region’s largest and most prestigious legal technology conference and trade show, opens next Wednesday with a keynote address by Steve Harmon, director of legal services at Cisco Systems, Inc. Harmon will discuss the processes and technologies developed by the company to support its in-house legal department and outside counsel. The event, which takes place June 24-25 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, is expected to attract a record number of attendees. Complete conference information is available at www.legaltechshow.com.

"I always make it a point to hit both New York and West Coast LegalTech. New York provides a super-saturated, mile-high view of the industry that cannot be missed, while the LA show allows attendees to refine an agenda from February's event to create a tailored vision for their organization,” said advisory board member Patrick Oot, director of electronic discovery and senior litigation counsel for Verizon. “Participants in LA also receive more focused face time with speakers, service providers, and Incisive Media staff. I’m looking forward to seeing many of my West Coast colleagues there."

Additional conference program highlights include:

• Thursday’s keynote panel of four noted e-discovery experts, including two United States Magistrate judges, discussing a wide range of practical ethical issues related to today’s e-discovery environment. This session is open to all attendees and has been approved for one free ethics CLE credit.
• LegalTech Town Hall, a question and answer session focused on in-house law department teams. Attendees can submit questions for the panel, led by Patrick Oot, director of electronic discovery and senior counsel of Verizon, live or via Twitter. Speakers presenting case studies include David L. Burg, senior vice president, litigation, NBC Universal and Dawson Horn, III, senior litigation counsel, Tyco International.
• An expert panel discussion on Twitter, the emerging social media and microblogging tool, exploring the potential use of Twitter by law firms and lawyers.
• A series of sessions designed to help law firms and legal professionals cope with change in the face of economic uncertainty. These will include “Retooling Legal Teams with Education and Collaboration in Challenging Economic Times,” presented by The Sedona Conference; and a career networking breakfast event on “Greening Your Career.”

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Source: businesswire.com

Check your policy! No privilege when e-mailing lawyer from work

A New Jersey court has held that e-mails employees send to their attorneys via work computers are not protected by the attorney-client privilege.

Attorney-client privilege is one of the most well-established rights to confidentiality. The court’s willingness to rule that an employer’s right to control how employees use its computer equipment trumps attorney-client privilege is significant. The decision makes it clearer than ever that employers should carefully consider the language they use in their employee handbooks.

Where did it come from?

Maria Stengart, the plaintiff in Stengart v. Loving Care Agency (Docket No. BER-L-858-08, N.J. Super. Law Div., 2009), resigned from her management position in late 2007. She soon filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging she was constructively discharged as the result of a hostile work environment.

Before resigning, Stengart had exchanged e-mails with her attorney using her company-issued laptop computer. She did not, however, send the e-mails through her company e-mail address. Instead, she transmitted them from her personal Yahoo.com e-mail account, which she maintained and used sporadically during business hours. Yahoo e-mail accounts are web-based, with no software to download, and are password protected.

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Source: Business Management Daily
By: Sandro Polledri

AIIM Releases Revised EDMS Recommended Practices

AIIM, the non-profit industry association focused on enterprise content management (ECM) announces the release of the revised AIIM ARP-1 — 2009, Analysis, Selection, and Implementation of Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS). The document can be downloaded at http://www.aiim.org/standards/article.aspx?ID=36656. It is also available on the Integrated Solutions website at http://www.isminfo.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1438&Itemid=109. This recommended practice was originally published in 2001 and has been updated as technologies matured and were updated.

As part of the update, AIIM captured the best practices for a trusted document management system. “We noticed increased discussion in the industry about what constitutes a trusted system, so we undertook the process of determining the general parameters of the best practices in the industry,” said Robert M. Blatt, chair of the AIIM Implementation Guidelines Committee There are four elements necessary for a system to be trusted: 1. duplicate copies generated and one copy stored offsite in a secure location; 2. use of media and hardware sufficient to prevent unauthorized alterations; 3. ability to verify the accuracy of the system through audit logs; and 4. business practices and policies to support the system.

“Through the AIIM Implementation Guidelines Committee we found that many systems already meet several of the elements, but they may be lacking policies and procedures or they may not be storing the information offsite, and that makes the entire system vulnerable," said Arthur Hedge, CastleVentures. "The last thing an organization would want to happen is to spend thousands of dollars on a system, and then not be able to say that the electronic information is an accurate rendition of what was put in the system for safekeeping.”

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Source: isminfo.com

Finding Plaintiffs' Ex-Employee and his New Employers Culpable for the Spoliation of Ex-Employee's Laptop, Court Orders Adverse Inference and Monetary

Beard Research, Inc. v. Kates, 2009 WL 1515625 (Del. Ch. May, 29, 2009) (Unpublished)

In this case, arising from plaintiffs’ claims that defendants interfered with business relationships and misappropriated trade secrets, plaintiffs sought sanctions against defendants for the destruction of information on a laptop computer which belonged to defendant Michael Kates, a former employee of plaintiffs. The court refused to award default judgment, as requested, but ordered an adverse inference against Kates and ordered monetary sanctions against Kates and defendants Advanced Synthesis Group (“ASG”) and ASDI, Inc. (“ASDI”) resulting from Kates’s destruction of a relevant hard drive and ASG’s and ASDI’s failure to take reasonable steps to prevent that destruction.

Dr. Michael Kates was employed by plaintiffs between 1997 and February 2004. In mid-2003, while still employed by plaintiffs, Kates purchased a Gateway laptop for business purposes. Between 2003 and early 2004, Kates’s relationship with plaintiffs deteriorated. In December 2003, Kates resigned from plaintiff C&B Research & Development, Inc. (“CB”) and on February 13, 2004, Kates also resigned from plaintiff Beard Research, Inc. (“BR”). Kates began working at ASG three days later and eventually went to work for ASDI; he continued to use the Gateway laptop. ASDI provided management services for ASG and both plaintiffs and defendants were involved in the sale of chemical compounds through a catalog, among other things. On May 4, 2005, CB and BR filed suit against Kates, ASDI, ASG and others.

Discovery was contentious and plaintiffs eventually filed three motions to compel. The third motion sought production of Kates’s Gateway laptop. Upon production of the laptop, plaintiffs’ expert discovered evidence of extensive deletions. Accordingly, plaintiffs filed a motion for sanctions. Following the court’s discussion of the relevant facts, it concluded that defendants had a duty to preserve arising no later than June 2005 and that “three separate sets of actions require[d] discussion:”

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Source: ediscoverylaw.com

Forewarned is Forearmed

Checklist

• What is your company's data recovery plan? How long will it take to integrate the data?
• How will the data be backed up? Will this preserve the integrity, as well as, the substance of the data?
• Are you able to comply with my company's retention policy?
• Where will the data be stored?
• Who has access to the data?
• What is the background of the SaaS company and the people that will be looking after my data?
• What plans are in place to transfer my data should your company cease trading?

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has become one of the true phenomena of the business computing market in recent years. Despite only existing as a concept since 1999, the global value of SaaS contracts is expected to reach $10bn this year according to research consultancy IDC.

SaaS is used for a wide range of applications from email to personnel record keeping, customer relationship management software to computer-aided design packages. From the customer's point of view it reduces upfront costs, thus allowing maintenance to become someone else's problem. It also enables companies to use the latest versions of software without persistent upgrading expenses.

There has been a great deal of discussion about the pros and cons for companies thinking of using SaaS solutions, but relatively little about what the legal risks might be. Although the principle of SaaS is a sound one, using SaaS can create some real dangers for businesses if the right questions are not asked at the outset. SaaS providers are able to provide a cost-effective service due to the economies of scale they achieve by hosting software remotely from their clients and effectively sharing it between a large number of different clients. In this situation, it is also common for the client's data to be stored on the supplier's servers. This is where the legal problems can begin.

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Source: nccmembership.co.uk
By: John Lang

Women in eDiscovery to Host Educational Luncheon at LegalTech West Coast

Women in eDiscovery today announced that it is hosting an educational luncheon at LegalTech West Coast on Thursday, June 25, 2009, at noon, featuring a presentation by Amy Longo, Partner in the Securities Litigation Practice Group and Co-Chair of the Electronic Discovery and Document Retention Practice at O’Melveny & Myers LLP.

Longo’s address is entitled “Breaking the Code: How Changing Technology Impacts Courts' Approaches to Electronic Discovery Disputes.” The federal electronic discovery rules have been widely litigated since their enactment several years ago. As the 2006 Advisory Committee observed, the "rapidity of technological change" necessitates a flexible and evolving approach to ESI. The influence of new technologies and the law's adaptation to these developments are a recurring theme of courts' decisions in this arena. Longo will examine the key areas where advancements in how parties may conduct discovery are playing out in the courts' views on subjects ranging from reasonable accessibility and privilege protection to preservation and the avoidance of sanctions.

Women in eDiscovery is an organization that brings together businesswomen interested in technology related to the legal industry and provides opportunities to help them grow personally and professionally through leadership, education, networking support, and national recognition.

LegalTech West Coast, the most important legal technology event on the West Coast, is June 24-25 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Details of LegalTech West Coast can be found at www.legaltechshow.com.

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Source: minneapolis.dbusinessnews.com

Delaware Chancery Homes In on EDD

In a spate of recent rulings, the court signals that companies need to engage in early preservation of data

If lawyers viewed the dearth of Delaware Court of Chancery electronic discovery rulings as evidence of the court's lack of concern about e-discovery battles, a spate of recent rulings and opinions from the court may have dispelled any false comfort.

The court issued two letter rulings and two opinions between May 18 and June 2 squarely addressing e-discovery issues. Lawyers say the decisions flesh out the Chancery's sparse e-discovery case law, which was previously tackled by only a handful of cases since 2002. Given the court's role as judiciary for the array of U.S. companies chartered in Delaware, the changes are likely to have an outsized effect on corporate practitioners, lawyers who practice in the state say.

The new rulings address a panoply of issues, including early preservation of evidence and who should pay for expensive data-recovery projects. The two opinions grant adverse inferences -- when a court considers missing evidence to be harmful to the party that can't produce it -- for data destruction. They also award costs and legal fees to the party that made the motion to address the issue.

Kevin Brady, vice chairman of the business law group at Wilmington, Del.'s Connolly Bove Lodge & Hutz and a member of the Court of Chancery Rules Committee, said the rules changes show that e-discovery is becoming a more visible issue with the court. "It's a wake-up call for practitioners," Brady said. "It's telling practitioners that it's probably a good idea that everyone look at these issues sooner rather than later."

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Source: law.com
By: Sheri Qualters

Kroll Ontrack Survey: IT Managers Underestimate Impact of Data Loss

Independent survey commissioned by Kroll Ontrack finds most IT managers fail to consider the ‘hidden costs’ of data loss to a business.

IT managers may be putting company data at risk by underestimating the effect of its loss. This is one of the key findings of a new survey launched in Sydney today by Kroll Ontrack®, provider of the leading Ontrack® Data Recovery solutions. Specifically, the survey found that just seven per cent of respondents believe data loss has a ‘high’ impact on a business.

“The results suggest that IT managers are not making the connection between data loss and lost revenue to a company,” said Adrian Briscoe, General Manager, Ontrack Data Recovery APAC, a division of Kroll Ontrack. “They may not be taking into account hidden costs such as lost staff productivity, overtime, diverted resources and delays in responding to other issues. IT managers who do not fully appreciate the impact of data loss could also be taking unnecessary risks, such as backing up data using USB external hard drives, which can be a single point of failure.”

Data loss may also affect a company’s ability to comply with regulatory requirements regarding the security, retention and protection of important information. Failure to meet these requirements can result in heavy fines.

The problem of data loss – defined by the survey as unforeseen loss of data or information due to viruses, natural disasters, accidental deletion, system crashes, corruption or hardware failure – is one that many companies face. In fact, nearly half of all IT managers surveyed reported having lost data in their workplace in the last two years.

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Source: cio.com.au

Recovering data from a corrupt hard drive

Although all seems lost, there is a chance that data on a corrupt hard drive can be recovered.

Barely a day goes by without someone accosting me and demanding (with menaces) that I divulge everything I know about the black arts of data recovery.

To save me the hassle of explaining that, as an Aikido instructor, I can probably run much faster than they can, I will instead use this forum to share what I know about the subject.

Joking aside, data recovery is a serious and fast-growing global industry; besides the obvious emotional attachment we have with our data, it raises the age-old riddle of what monetary value we put on it.

In the past, data recovery houses have charged pretty much what they liked because people knew so little about it.

Most of us assume that once a drive dies, our data dies with it, although this is only partly true; those in the know can, with equal amounts of skill, good fortune, theatrics and jiggery-pokery, pull the virtual rabbit out of the hat and recover the seemingly unrecoverable.

To know more about data recovery, we need to know how a computer stores information at a raw level and how binary file collaboration results in sector variations of the allocation tables and subsequent cone and cylinder manipulation and fghtyuijnfdmnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Oops! Sorry, I nodded off there; the fact is we don't need to know that stuff to grasp how data recovery works.

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Source: watoday.com.au
By: Dave Thompson

Creating a Solid SharePoint Backup

A backup plan is an insurance policy for your data, providing a means to manage the risk of a system failure or human error that results in data loss. In law firms such as mine, Fenwick & West, where Microsoft SharePoint houses valuable content such as documents, wikis and calendars, it's of paramount importance that we adequately insure against the loss of those information assets.

A SharePoint backup plan needs several elements to provide for complete and flexible recovery. Because firms running SharePoint already own most of the required tools, implementing such a plan need not be costly. However, one element is missing from the out-of-the-box toolkit: automated, site-level backup. In this article, I'll explain the key components you'll need for your SharePoint backup plan, and show you (or your SharePoint administrator) how to build and deploy this missing element.

A solid backup plan doesn't need to be complicated. Backup software vendors would have you believe that only their product can field a robust and reliable backup strategy; that you must shell out a lot of cash, and commit significant system administration resources, in order to protect your SharePoint environment.

In many cases spending your firm's scarce resources on additional backup technology is unnecessary, as you already own the required software. For a comprehensive backup plan you'll need file-system and SQL database backups, as well as a means to recover any customizations to your SharePoint environment. You'll also want site-level backup so you can quickly restore a single site collection if accidentally deleted, or if you want to roll back to a previous version of a site (you'll find this particularly handy with "My Site").

Note: Those new to SharePoint may find Microsoft's nomenclature a bit confusing. In SharePoint, the terms "site" and "site collection" are sometimes used synonymously, other times not. What is true is that the most granular unit that can be backed up using the methods I describe below is a site collection.

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Source: law.com
By: Mark Gerow

New device assists law enforcement

The Universal Forensic Extraction Device, UFED for short, allows law enforcement agents to extract critical information from a suspect’s cell phone — even if the suspect thought the information was deleted.

The device is used with regularity in San Mateo County and prosecutors find it useful.

So far, in none of the cases in which the device was used has the defendant challenged or sought to suppress the information obtained by use of the UFED, said Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe.

“The defendants in those cases all pleaded out before any challenge occurred. Thus to this point the UFED has been a helpful investigative device without any problems in court,” Wagstaffe said.

Law enforcement agencies in San Carlos, San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto and San Francisco are all using the device locally.

The technology supports 1,600 plus models of cell phones, including smart phones and PDA devices.

Although its not a catch-all device, it is 90 percent effective in the field, said San Francisco police Sgt. Wayne Hom.

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Source: smdailyjournal.com
By: Bill Silverfarb

Email Fail

Survey shows most organizations still don’t treat e-mail as important business records.

Enterprises are unable to deal with the torrent of e-mail records bombarding their users because so many of them fail to set policies regarding retention, deletion and classification of e-mails, according to a report released by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM).

The report detailed the findings of a recent survey conducted among 1,109 members of AIIM, which showed most organizations fail to consistently handle e-mail management for legal discovery or efficiency purposes.

In spite of the prevailing use of e-mail as a common means of communicating business obligations and relationships, the survey found that over 50 percent of organizations don’t have policies to deal with important e-mails as shareable and retrievable records. And more than 84 percent have no way to justify e-mails of a certain age or type have been deleted.

“In a large organization, several millions of emails are handled each day. Most are of no lasting consequence, but each day there will be a significant number of important emails involving the organization in obligations, agreements, contracts, regulations and discussions, all of which might be of legal significance.”

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Source: cioinsight.com
By: Ericka Chickowski

State Bar's Dispute Resolution Section Issues New Report on Use of Discovery in Arbitration

State Bar's Dispute Resolution Section Issues New Report on Use of Discovery in Arbitration

A new report issued by the New York State Bar Association's Dispute Resolution Section sets forth Precepts that will help arbitrators handle discovery in domestic commercial cases in a cost-effective and fair manner, consistent with the expectation of the parties who select the arbitration process. The Report On Arbitration Discovery in Domestic Commercial Cases can be a significant tool particularly as the use of arbitration grows for large, complex commercial cases, as well as smaller cases.

"The Dispute Resolution Section's report is a particularly exciting development for the still growing field of alternative dispute resolution. I am deeply grateful for, and proud of, the work of the drafting committee - Carroll Neesemann, Sherman Kahn, and John Wilkinson - for creating what will be an essential guide to arbitrators in orchestrating discovery and making discovery determinations in domestic commercial arbitration," said Simeon H. Baum of New York (Resolve Mediation Services, Inc.), the first, and immediate past, chair of the Dispute Resolution Section.

"The State Bar has a longstanding tradition of responding to the critical issues that affect our profession. The approval of this report will go a long way toward helping arbitrators resolve future discovery disputes in a manner balancing the values of efficiency, responsiveness to party expectations, procedural due process, and fairness. The result should greatly benefit practitioners, parties, and administrators - in short all users of the arbitration process," he concluded.

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Source: readmedia.com

BALL IN YOUR COURT: Hear That Rumble

Hear that rumble? It's the bench's mounting frustration with the senseless, slipshod way lawyers approach keyword search. It started with federal Magistrate Judge John Facciola's observation that keyword search entails a complicated interplay of sciences beyond a lawyer's ken. He said lawyers selecting search terms without expert guidance were truly going "where angels fear to tread."

Federal Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm called for "careful advance planning by persons qualified to design effective search methodology" and testing search methods for quality assurance. "The party selecting the methodology must be prepared to explain the rationale for the method chosen to the court, demonstrate that it is appropriate for the task, and show that it was properly implemented," he declared.

Then federal Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck issued a "wake up call to the bar," excoriating counsel for proposing thousands of artless search terms. He states the following:

"Electronic data discovery requires cooperation between opposing counsel and transparency in all aspects of preservation and production of electronically stored information. Moreover, where counsel are using keyword searches for retrieval of ESI, they at a minimum must carefully craft the appropriate keywords, with input from custodians as to the words and abbreviations they use, and the proposed methodology must be quality control tested to ensure accuracy in retrieval and elimination of "false positives." It is time that the bar— even lawyers who did not come of age in the computer era — understand this."

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Source: lawtechnews.com
By: Craig Ball

Addressing compliance requirements in cloud computing contracts

Companies looking to use cloud computing infrastructure for data backup and storage need to factor in the compliance requirements before contracts are signed.

In some cases, the cloud provider will be able to satisfy compliance requirements -- but often at a price, according to two market experts. Even before price negotiations begin, CIOs must understand that data backup and storage in the cloud does not remove a company's responsibility for the legal, regulatory and audit obligations attached to that information.

CIOs should be ready with a list of compliance questions for cloud vendors. But don't expect their answers to suffice. Indeed, Gartner Inc. published a report last month stating that security, privacy and compliance will prevent adoption of cloud computing in regulated industries and global companies through 2012.

Here are some guidelines and advice from Debra Logan, an enterprise content management analyst for Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner, and Tom McHale, vice president of product management for CA's GRC manager suite.

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Source: SearchCIO
By: Linda Tucci

The frustrations of e-discovery

E-discovery can reduce firms’ exposure to legal risks, but implementing it remains a challenge

As escalating volumes and types of information drive swelling e-discovery costs, many firms are exploring how information retrieval technology can support critical steps in the e-discovery process. Manually reviewing documents represents the largest direct cost associated with e-discovery. To control this expense and mitigate legal risk, businesses are re-examining strategies, processes and technology investments.

Currently, few companies report having a holistic approach to e-discovery. Forrester’s research suggests just 23 per cent have an end-to-end approach to gather and filter data. And two-thirds consider their e-discovery strategy reactive rather than proactive.

We asked if firms were confident that, if challenged, their organisation could demonstrate that its electronically stored information was accurate, accessible and trustworthy. Fewer than one in five was very confident.

Several factors account for this lack of confidence. These include large and growing volumes of content; diverse applications, tools, and file types; undocumented, disorganised data architectures; increased litigation and rapidly changing case law; and a fragmented vendor ecosystem.

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Source: computing.co.uk
By: Brian Hill

Could SharePoint simply be 'good enough?'

At the EMC Writer's Conference last Friday in New York City, Bryant Duhon, an editor at AIIM's Infonomics magazine gave a presentation on Microsoft SharePoint. Many participants engaged in a lively discussion, which concluded that while SharePoint wasn't the best solution out there, "it is good enough" for most organizations' requirements.

Duhon pointed out that it may be a good choice for many IT departments because it's cheap and often free. It is also familiar because it is a Microsoft product, even if it's not the best technology available. Whitney Tidmarsh, CMO for the Content Management and Archiving Division at EMC, pointed out that SharePoint was never going to be a complete ECM solution, but it brings ECM to the desktop level. She sees value in that, because it puts the idea of content management in front of end users.

The fact that it's fairly easy for end users to understand and deploy is a strength on one hand, but it can also result in literally thousands of SharePoint sites across the enterprise, raising a huge, governance red flag.

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Source: fiercecontentmanagement.com
By: Ron Miller

Poor ECM 'Destroying American System Of Justice'

The shabby state of most enterprise content management implementations, combined with lady Justice's thirst for electronic documents, has made it so that "only the rich and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) can afford to litigate," in the words of attorney Ralph Losey, who specializes in legal applications of technology.

Losey, whom I met at a conference sponsored by EMC (NYSE: EMC) Corporation, decried what he called "extortion by discovery demands," which forces most defendants to simply settle their lawsuits rather than spend huge sums to defend themselves. It doesn't have to be this way, he said, but "the failure of business to adopt enterprise content management is destroying the American system of justice."

"There's enterprise and there's content but there's no management," he quipped.
Most companies, or at least those with a functioning legal department, now realize that courts expect them to make all forms of electronic communication available to their opponents during the pre-trial process called "discovery." That includes not only email but instant messages, blogs and any other relevant documents -- electronic and otherwise (hence the term "e-discovery").

And that's where it starts getting dicey, of course -- what's the definition of relevant, and how do you find it? Especially in an enterprise where some data is stored in structured databases, other documents are found in unstructured repositories like SharePoint servers, and yet others in enterprise content management applications like Documentum.

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Source: informationweek.com
By: Michael Hickins

HP, other tech giants assess cloud computing

The trend toward cloud computing may be revolutionizing the tech industry, but it isn't happening overnight.

While tech companies have been rushing to offer cloud-based services — applications and services that are provided over the Internet — there are still plenty of unexplored uses and unresolved technical challenges, according to executives at Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo, who met at HP's Palo Alto campus Monday for a status conference on their efforts to create a "test bed" of large data centers around the world.

Major computing centers in Russia, South Korea and Malaysia have joined the effort, HP announced Monday. In addition to Intel and Yahoo, other partners include academic and government research institutes in the United States, Singapore and Germany.

The effort, known as "Open Cirrus," serves as a massive computer laboratory for researchers who want to test various configurations of hardware and software and see how they can deliver large-scale computing services to Internet users around the world. Other big tech companies, including IBM and Google, have also launched "test beds" to conduct their own cloud-related research.

Many consumers and businesses already find it convenient or cost-effective to use Web-based e-mail, business software applications and other computing services delivered over the Internet, from data centers in remote locations. But Russ Daniels, HP's chief technology officer for
cloud services strategy, said those services still represent only "a small percentage" of the world's total computing workload.

As that percentage grows, Intel Vice President Andrew Chien said, the trend toward cloud computing could spur both the creation of more big commercial data centers and new applications and hardware for end-users — the individuals who use personal computers and mobile devices to access data and services from the Internet.

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Source: San Jose Mercury News
By: Brandon Bailey