eDiscovery Daily Blog
This is a Non-Political Post: eDiscovery Trends
At the outset, I feel that I should state that, given that this post is about the Hilary Clinton emails and the FBI handling of them.
In his latest post (E-Discovery Lessons from the Huma Abedin E-Mails), Craig Ball takes a look at the eDiscovery implications regarding the handling of the Huma Abedin emails and his distaste for FBI Director James Comey’s handling of them. Craig states: “‘Reckless’ doesn’t begin to describe Comey’s self-indulgent decision to release information about a situation he clearly does not yet grasp, in a manner that elevates Jim Comey above longstanding Justice Department policy and the integrity of a Presidential election.”
Nonetheless, regardless of political leanings, Craig notes that his post “will not be a political screed, so while I always welcome critical and substantive comments on anything I write, please hew to the e-discovery aspects of same. Please.” Of course, at least one commenter (so far) still questioned the political intent of his post, characterizing Craig’s comments as “partisan”. Not surprisingly, there were already 20 total comments on Craig’s post in less than a full day (including mine).
Craig’s post, and the comments back and forth are well worth reading. One of the eDiscovery discussion points related to the cross-collection correlation of email messages – which Craig wrote about here and we covered here, with back and forth discussion between Craig and our CTO, Bill David – and the challenge of doing that when the Clinton emails were produced to the State Department in paper (yes, paper) format. There was also a discussion as to whether the Clinton claim that “more than 90% of those emails should have already been captured in the State Department’s email system” was true and could have eliminated most of the email matching effort to determine whether there is significant new information in the Abedin emails that bear investigating.
And, to think this latest round was initiated because of our social media gone wrong poster child, Anthony Weiner. Some people never learn to think before they hit send.
Bill Dimm provided a link to Hilary Clinton’s fact sheet regarding the emails in one of his comments, which answered the question as to why Clinton produced printed copies to the State Department instead of ESI, noting that the Foreign Affairs Manual of the State Department provides this guidance with regard to how to preserve e-mail records:
“Until technology allowing archival capabilities for long-term electronic storage and retrieval of E-mail messages is available and installed, those messages warranting preservation as records (for periods longer than current E-mail systems routinely maintain them) must be printed out and filed with related records.” [5 FAM 443.3].
So, our government is just as behind as the rest of the legal profession (if not more) with regard to production formats. Big surprise.
We’ve already discussed one area where eDiscovery might impact the coming election. Maybe this is another.
So, what do you think? Are you sick of hearing about the election yet? Me too! Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.