Email Evidence

From an article in the New York Times...

A judge in a US district court in New York has ruled that an investment bank must pay the cost of retrieving email evidence in a lawsuit against the bank.

"In her opinion, which spanned 38 pages and quoted Henry David Thoreau in its introduction, Judge Scheindlin argued that federal standards governing the discovery process are outdated and were written before the flowering of e-mail as the primary means of corporate communication.

She set new standards, which effectively give plaintiffs the right to ask that investment banks provide expanded levels of e-mail traffic that may take a significant effort to retrieve, if the plaintiff proves that the messages are relevant to the case. The investment bank would then be responsible for bearing the cost.".

Over the past dozen or so years, email has been become an increasingly important form of evidence in a lot of cases. The significance of this ruling for those of us "in the business" may be an increased interest in centralized journaling. Of course, it could also go the other way: companies may decide to stop backing up data in order to avoid having to bear costs like this... but I doubt that will happen much.