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Psystar Case Reveals Poor Email Archiving At Apple
Ian Lamont writes "Buried in the court filings of the recently concluded Psystar antitrust suit against Apple is a document that discussed Apple's corporate policy regarding employee email. Apparently, Apple has no company-wide policy for archiving, saving, or deleting email. This could potentially run afoul of e-discovery requirements, which have tripped up other companies that have been unable to produce emails and other electronic files in court. A lawyer quoted in the article (but not involved in the case) called Apple's retention policy 'negligent.' However, the issue did not help Psystar's lawsuit against Apple — a judge dismissed the case earlier this week."
It's probably more to say "if you think you will get busted you're not allowed to start removing things", not "you can't remove anything because some day in a time far far away someone may want to look you up."
But that doesn't equate to legal requirements for a company to retain ALL email.
No it doesn't. But there are two issues with email. First is that if you don't have a standard policy for retention/destruction of email (or network share backups or whatever), it opens you up to allegations that you destroyed evidence after a lawsuit was filed. If people can delete things at any time, it makes it hard to show if it was coincidence that your VP just happened to delete all that relevant stuff after a suit was filed or not. With a standard policy, if everyone complies, then this matter is much more cut and dry.
Second is Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. I know a lot of companies have banned external instant messenging because of retention concerns related to Sarbanes-Oxley (since you can't easily log AIM and other IM discussions). I'm a bit surprised that Apple hasn't got policies in place given their issues with improper options in the past. Similar laws, I guess they didn't take the scandal very seriously.
Yes but IMHO it should be the same as taxes, that is 7 years. If the excrement hasn't hit the bladed cooling device in that time then chunk away. But if there isn't at least SOME kind of retention policy required of corporations you'll see every Enron style ripoff artist simply switch everything to email so they won't have to worry about having any paper trails. You have to balance the needs of the public and the shareholders with the needs of the company. But since we are rapidly switching(and some could argue we already have) to a paperless society then we really should have a set number of years for electronic records like email and IM. After all, look at what has come out against MSFT over the Vista Capable scam thanks to email.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
From what I can tell, this is old news and the protocol has been set. Destroy documents every so often. Do it consistently. Do not wait until there is a budget. Continuously go through everything and destroy everything that older than a cutoff. If you are told to stop, stop, and don't start trying to catch up on the destruction. This has been SOP since the Enron mess.he legal requirement is to follow protocol and not destroy stuff after you are told not to. This is nothing new, and if Apple does not have a consistent policy, then that is bad for them. The fact is that the paper trail is there. If you don't want a paper trail, have an undocumented face to face meeting.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Why would Apple bother to keep emails when they already know that the risk of the email being used against them is far worse than the penalty for not keeping them.