Electronic Discovery and Evidence

Increase in Attorneys in Reviewing Electronic Data

Faced With Data Explosion, Law Firms Tap Temp Attorneys. Fueled largely by electronic data, rising discovery costs drive trend toward temp hires. "To avoid being buried alive by the ever-rising piles of discovery documents that define today's litigation, many law firms are relying more than ever on temporary attorneys to help them make sense of the mess. Fueled in large part by electronic correspondence and data, the accelerating costs of document discovery by some estimates is expected to rise to $2.9 billion by 2007. All those documents equate to labor-intensive work for law firms that need to comb through the piles and analyze what surfaces. . . "

Deleting Data - Evidence Eliminator

Following the deleter. Software can cover up that stuff, awkward or illegal, you have saved in the computer. That doesn't mean the law can't find it. "DELETE isn't enough anymore. Consider the case of Robert M. Johnson, the former Newsday publisher who, prosecutors allege, used a software program called Evidence Eliminator to rid his computers of child porn. As anyone who watches shows like "CSI" can attest, pressing "delete" makes files invisible, perhaps, but it doesn't make them gone.  Making files gone has become a booming industry unto itself. Sales of Evidence Eliminator ($149.95) run in the millions of dollars each year, says Andrew Churchill, managing director of England-based Robin Hood Software — and it's just one of over a dozen "file shredder" or "anti-forensic" products on the market. Eraser, a similar tool available free over the Internet, is downloaded roughly 2.5 million times per year, according to its distributor, Ireland's Heidi Computers. . . "

Instant Messages Ruled Admissible

Messages sent by computer can be used as evidence.  "The state Supreme Court ruled yesterday that police don’t need authorization from the attorney general to capture instant messages sent by computer. The question often comes up in prosecutions of individuals accused of soliciting sex from minors over the Internet. . . "

IPods used as Hard Drive Storage Devices

IPods Serve as Hidden Hard Drives.  "Few electronic gadgets have been marketed as successfully as have the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)  iPod and its close relatives. As of the end of 2004, Apple had sold over 10 million iPods, and Apple's competitors are not doing badly with their own music players that store their tunes on tiny hard drives or solid state memory chips. . . . IPods contain a tiny (matchbox size) hard drive, very much like the one in your PC or laptop. The basic models have a 20 GB capacity, while the more expensive Photo iPod has a 60 GB drive (most laptop computers have hard drive capacities of around 40 GB). Mini iPods have 5 GB drives. . . . Plugged into a conventional computer, the devices are recognized as external hard drives, onto which can be written any information that will fit on a computer.

Keeping Government E-mail Secret

In Our View: Official e-mail shouldn't be secret. "It's healthy to take a look at our laws periodically to make sure they're keeping up with the times. But some of the discussion surrounding Utah's open records law is going in an unhealthy direction. At a meeting last week, the legislative task force examining the Government Records Access and Management Act, or GRAMA, looked at the question of whether government e-mails and instant messages constitute public records under the law. The discussion tended to lean toward declaring the records private on the grounds that they are not printed. Because they're not printed, the reasoning goes, they could be considered conversations. . . "

E-mails Again Uncover the Truth

Official Had Aide Send Data to White House. WASHINGTON, June 17 - E-mail messages obtained by investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting show that its chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, extensively consulted a White House official shortly before she joined the corporation about creating an ombudsman's office to monitor the balance and objectivity of public television and radio programs.  Mr. Tomlinson said in an interview three months ago that he did not think he had instructed a subordinate to send material on the ombudsman project to Mary C. Andrews at her White House office in her final days as director of global communications, a political appointment. . . ."

Electronic Discovery Reference Model Project Launched

Electronic Discovery Reference Model Project Launched. "On May 25, 2005, twenty-nine organizations launched the Electronic Discovery Reference Model Project. The group will follow an open process to develop a reference model describing the concepts and relationships that comprise the electronic discovery processes. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) will provide a common, flexible and extensible framework for the development, selection, evaluation and use of electronic discovery products and services. . . "

RFID Chip Tracks DC Travelers

DC Metro Tracks Travelers. "Documents obtained by EPIC from the Washington Metro Authority reveal that the SmarTrip system collects detailed travel information. THE ISSUE Lack of privacy safeguards for DC Metro riders. THE BACKGROUND The SmarTrip farecard, which includes an embedded RFID chip, tracks each rider's metro travel and can be linked to address and credit card data. Most records held by state agencies are protected by law, but no similar protections exist for the SmarTrip system. . ."

PDF Redactions Unveiled

Military secrets escape through PDF file. " The US army has been embarrassed by its failure to properly protect a partially classified document that dealt with the killing of an Italian agent in Iraq. Experts are warning people to be careful with electronic documents that contain sensitive data after a breach in which classified US military information thought to be hidden in a PDF document was uncovered. Portions of the document had been "blacked out" by electronic means. But apparently, it was possible for outsiders to copy and paste the blacked-out sections into another file — and see the text that had been hidden. . . "

EDD Rules: The Great Debate

EDD Rules: The Great Debate. Should the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure distinguish between traditional discovery and e-discovery? "When a Florida court asked defendant Morgan Stanley to produce discovery documents a year ago this month, little did the Wall Street securities giant know it would be tangled in a web of electronic discovery woes. . . "