Judge Gives Intel More Time To Find Missing E-mail

narramissic writes "ITworld is reporting that Intel has until April 17 (7 days more than the original deadline of April 10) to 'explain to a judge why it lost e-mail records that could provide proof that the chip maker used anticompetitive practices as alleged by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).' According to an order from Vincent Poppiti, the special master hearing negotiations of the case, the court is looking for an accounting of Intel's document preservation problems and a proposal for a better solution for archiving future records."

Comments

They could try the truth...

[Anonymous Coward]

... we can't find them because we deleted them.

Re:They could try the truth...

[Tackhead]

> ... we can't find them because we deleted them.

Hey, whaddya think this is, the SCO case? :)

Re:They could try the truth...

[ZDRuX]

... we can't find them because we deleted them. Actually... that's exactly what they did.

That process hit a snag when Intel said in March it had accidentally deleted many of those records, including e-mail written by its Chairman Craig Barrett and CEO Paul Ottelini. The problem happened because the company failed to instruct certain employees to keep records of their own e-mail, other employees assumed the IT department would do that task for them, and meanwhile the company's IT system was automatically deleting most e-mail after a certain amount of time, Intel told a judge.

and...

"Although Intel has agreed to restore all data captured in the thousands of backup tapes it made and preserved, no one can say with any degree of confidence that this will put Humpty-Dumpty back together again," AMD said in a March 5 court statement.

I call poppycock

[Cervantes]

This whole thing sounds like crap from Intel. "Whoops, your honour, we, a giant, multibillion dollar organization, staffed with the brightest engineering and IT minds that money can buy, accidentally forgot to keep email archives. TeeHee. No idea how that happened. Oh well, since there's no evidence of our transgressions thanks to this 'oopsie', we'll just go home now..."

I mean, does anyone actually believe that they forgot to uncheck that annoying little box in Exchange labelled "Delete all incriminating emails after 30 days"? I could believe that a few emails got misplaced, even believe that one set of tapes was damaged or corrupted... but "the staff wasn't doing it, IT didn't think about it, and the system was automatically deleting them"?

I think I may just keep buying AMD, mostly because I'm worried that Intel quality control is about the same as their IT competence, and I'll open up my new Core Duo to find a severed human finger in there.
(but safely wrapped in a clean room suit).

Re:I call poppycock

[Dausha]

"...No idea how that happened. Oh well, since there's no evidence of our transgressions thanks to this 'oopsie', we'll just go home now..."

Except, it does not exactly work like that. Law is more experience than reason; courts know that if you have evidence that points to your guilt you're more likely to "lose" it. So, when the plaintiff can prove you probably had evidence showing your guilt and you fail to produce it, the court can allow a negative inference to be drawn. This means the judge will tell the jury that the defendant likely had incriminating evidence and destroyed it and that the jury is free to assume it was destroyed to cover the defendant's ass.

I clerked for a plaintiff's firm that was good at this sort of thing. The attorney tended to have defendants who had dispatch records that were destroyed quarterly by standard operating procedure (SOP) (required by law that they have _a_ SOP). However, one defendant had a special SOP to destroy such tapes as soon as frigg'n possible when something bad happened---like three separate, fatal accidents caused by its company on one day recorded on one dispatch tape. The request for the tape was made within a couple of weeks and "oops," the defendant lost it. The Court had a field day with the defendant.

The problem, however, is that a gullible jury can be persuaded that the adage "never assume malice where incompetence will suffice" is in play.

Here there was probably an email retention SOP that was violated by these emails going missing. In that case, the judge is probably giving Intel another week to settle or come up with the emails or allow AMD to move for a negative inference that it will more likely win.

Uh huh....sure....

[kcbrown]

FTFA:

That process hit a snag when Intel said in March it had accidentally deleted many of those records, including e-mail written by its Chairman Craig Barrett and CEO Paul Ottelini.

Yeah, sure. Email sent by the corporate executives accidentally deleted?

People get their asses fired and sued for much less than that.

The people responsible for the email of the executives don't do anything of the sort unless they're explicitly told to.

So I think it's about as likely that the email messages in question got "accidentally" deleted as it is that the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was "accidentally" bombed.