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AMD Claims Intel Inadvertently Destroyed Evidence in Antitrust Case

Posted by Hemos on from the ah-the-smell-of-open-court-in-the-morning dept.

Marcus Yam writes "In an unpublished statement to the U.S. District Court of Delaware, AMD alleges Intel allowed the destruction of evidence in pending antitrust litigation. According to the opening letter of the AMD statement, 'Through what appears to be a combination of gross communication failures, an ill-conceived plan of document retention and lackluster oversight by outside counsel, Intel has apparently allowed evidence to be destroyed.'"

3 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. That is a bit silly by sphealey · · Score: 5, Informative

    Historically e-mail systems were never designed for intensive archiving and ad-hoc searching across the database. In fact, even the current generation of systems require bolt-on archivers to meet the new federal evidence requirements. And I talk to people every day at very large entities that are still using Outlook Express, local mailbox storage, and have no usable archiving system.

    Suggesting that the inability to search e-mail in legacy systems is "destruction of evidence" is more than a bit silly in my personal opinion.

    sPh

    1. Re:That is a bit silly by Chris+Burke · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Suggesting that the inability to search e-mail in legacy systems is "destruction of evidence" is more than a bit silly in my personal opinion.

      Describing it as accidental destruction of evidence though is perfectly accurate, at least from a non-technical legal point of view.

      "Through what appears to be a combination of gross communication failures, an ill-conceived plan of document retention and lackluster oversight by outside counsel, Intel has apparently allowed evidence to be destroyed."

      That's pretty much what you're describing, right? Large organizations with completely inadequate data retention, which inevitably destroys data irrespective of that data's importance, in large degree because the company just doesn't have a solid plan in place? That's all AMD is alleging, that their system was inadequate to the task, not that Intel deliberately crippled their email system to lose emails they didn't want showing up during discovery. The fact that this isn't uncommon in email systems makes the argument more believable, not less.

      If they were alleging deliberate destruction of evidence, that would be a whole different ball of wax.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
  2. Data Retention part is True by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work at Intel and the retention policy is VERY short on sent items and equally short for all the other mail folders in the inbox. I hear of people losing emails all the time because of this. Hell, I have lost a few sent emails myself. Also, from what I heard (from friends in IT) that we only keep a backup of 7 days of all the exchange server data only for disaster/worst case scenario reasons.