Case Where IT Tech’s Fast-Talk Had Zero Persuasive Value with Judge

There is a long Labor Day weekend coming up, so here is another summer rerun and update for your reading pleasure. It is a spoliation sanctions case involving disk-wiping software. The hard drives of defendant’s key employees contained zeros, all zeros, nothing but zeros. The plaintiff made much ado about nothing, exposed the zero-credibility of the defendant college IT “experts,” and attained case-ending sanctions. Jane Doe v. Norwalk Community College, 2007 WL 2066496, 2007 LEXIS 51084 (D. Conn. July 16, 2007).

Case of the Evil Professor and Fast-Talking Techs

First some background of this “Jane Doe” case. The main defendant here is a state community college. The plaintiff is a student alleging her college was negligent in its retention and supervision of a professor who sexually assaulted her. The now “former professor” is also a defendant, but with no legal representation. The student was permitted to file suit as “Jane Doe” to protect her privacy.

This opinion exposes the defendant’s IT techs who tried too hard to protect their employer and themselves with their bogus tech-talk. The case shows once again that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. It also shows that lawyers are fools not to hire outside experts when their client’s own techs’ veracity and expertise are challenged in court.

Zero Sum Game

After two years of litigation, Jane Doe persuaded the court that the college was withholding electronic evidence. The school was ordered to produce the computers of key witnesses for inspection by Doe’s computer forensic expert, Dorran Delay of DataTrack Resources. He inspected the college computers over a two-day period and found something very interesting. He found nothing, but in an enlightening Zen sort of way. Dorran Delay found that the hard drives were full of zeros. That is a whole lot of nothing.

Jane Doe’s next move was to file a motion for sanctions based on spoliation of evidence. She alleged that “the hard drives of key witnesses in this case were scrubbed” or “completely ‘wiped’ of data.” This led to a flurry of affidavits by Doe’s expert, Delay, and the counter-expert used by the college, its own in-house Information Technology Technician, Wyatt Bissell.

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Source: e-discoveryteam.com
By: Ralph Losey