Electronic Discovery: E-mail Trail Withstands the Delete Key

"A sex discrimination case that has been closely followed by the legal community is now likely to draw the attention of the business world as well, thanks to a $29.2 million verdict which, according to plaintiff’s counsel, is the largest single plaintiff sex discrimination verdict in U.S. history. The discrimination and retaliation lawsuit, Laura Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, pending in United States District Court of the Southern District of New York, has already distinguished itself for its breakthrough case law on the subject of electronic discovery, resulting in four widely cited opinions on that subject.
One of the most important lessons that businesses must learn from this case has almost nothing to do with sex discrimination or hiring and firing practices, but rather relates to the impact of electronic discovery, or e-discovery, on all lawsuits regardless of size. In a society where the storage and transmission of data has gone, almost overnight, from paper to megabyte, our legal system, and the discovery process in particular, is now forcing litigants to come to grips with this technology.

While the term “e-discovery” includes all computer data, such as graphics, databases, unpublished drafts or “metadata” (i.e., computer codes and hidden data revealing history, revisions and “data about data”), it is e-mail that has become the lightning rod among judges, lawyers and legal scholars in a gathering storm over electronic discovery.

Anecdotes abound, from funny to downright frightening, which demonstrate that e-mails are all too often sent with little forethought. Moreover, litigants are now realizing that e-mails – even “deleted” e-mails – continue to reside in
electronic format in many places."

Source: http://www.duanemorris.com/alerts/static/A_LitigE-Discovery042605.pdf