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ip: do you use an electronic shreader?
From: David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Sun, 04 May 1997 17:08:00 -0400
E-MAIL ARCHIVES CREATE LEGAL BURDEN With untold billions of e-mail messages stored on tapes and disk drives in companies and organizations throughout the country, legal experts now say that the electronic discovery process in lawsuits is now becoming a mini-industry, with the threat of having to pay the expense of delving into mountains of e-mail archives now acting as a catalyst for settling many commercial cases rather than defending them. "On one hard drive that takes up 10 square inches, you can store more than you can store on the whole floor of a building," says the CEO of Electronic Evidence Discovery, a company that provides computer support to parties in litigation. "Just the threat of conducting electronic discovery is a very powerful negotiation tool." Some judges have dealt with the issue by placing the burden of the search on the plaintiff, but this raises another problem -- most defendants don't want someone who's in the process of suing them poking around in their computer files. Judge Paul Niemeyer of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Baltimore is engaged in a national effort to re-examine the federal rules governing electronic discovery: "I sense that discovery is being used as a tool of oppression, rather than as a tool of fairness." (Miami Herald 1 May 97)
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