Deleting Emails Costs Morgan Stanley $1.45B

DoubleWhopper writes "The financial giant Morgan Stanley lost a $1.45 billion judgement yesterday due, in part, to their failure to retain old email. The judge in the case, 'frustrated at Morgan Stanley's repeated failure to provide [the plaintiff's] attorneys with e-mails, handed down a pretrial ruling that effectively found the bank had conspired to defraud' their former client. The CEO of a record retention software company noted, 'Morgan Stanley is going to be a harbinger'."

Comments

Re:Oh crap!

[TheNumberSix]

I freely admit I haven't RTFA, but I read some excellent coverage of this story on wsj.com.

Apparently, Morgan Stanley came forward, said they had produced all the emails. (time passes) They find some more emails and turn them over. (time passes) The find a closet stuffed with backup tapes and turn them over. (Time passes) Morgan Stanley files a document certifying that they turned everything over. (Time passes) Morgan finds even more emails and turns them over. This causes the judge to get annoyed.

One of the earlier problems was that Morgan had built a database to house old emails and the first time they were told to turnover emails, a sysadmin who was not in a clueful state just searched the database without finding out how much had already been imported into the DB. (Turned out the DB had only had a small percentage of old emails put into it.)