According to a court filing in the Psystar v. Apple lawsuit, Apple, Inc. has no corporate-wide policy on electronic document retention -- something one e-document expert told The Industry Standard was "negligent."
Employees could have emails from 5 years ago that become "potentially relevant", but because there was no policy in place regarding e-documents, those records could easily become destroyed -- making it potentially impossible for a plaintiff to make a case from internal documents.
One lawyer told me "that kind of crap could really get them in trouble."
Get the rest of the story from The Standard.
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Comments
Sounds like good plan to me.
Sounds like good plan to me. Wipe your trails clean.
you won't think it's a good
you won't think it's a good idea when apple starts losing lawsuits. destroying evidence is not a wise legal strategy, especially when you're a company that gets sued about once a day as it is. not to mention, litigation isn't cheap.
Well actually it is cheap if
Well actually it is cheap if you have in-house counsel.
Actually, with inhouse lawyers, the more cases you get, the cheaper those lawyers become. Their salaries are fixed so cost per case goes down :)
Blimey. You'd get into a ton
Blimey. You'd get into a ton of trouble for that in the UK. Pretty sure it's a legal requirement of any employer to retain all corporate communications, both internal and external.
See http://ralphlosey.wordpre
See
http://ralphlosey.wordpress.com/2008/10/26/sedona-provides-new-much-need...
Sedona's flow chart. Maybe Burden exceeds benefit in this case?
no industry standard
to my knowledge, the only way apple could get into trouble is if they show a pattern of destruction of corporate documents/communications coinciding with suits related to those documents
it is all about standard operating procedures - if apple policy is to delete documents the second they become obsolete, and their pattern of deletion shows this, then i do not believe there is anything a judge could impose
Posturing
Document destruction policies are ALL about destroying evidence... in an way that is unbiased in regards to any litigation.
The lawyers will tell you that you want document destruction policies to "save money in the sense of archival costs". I think that few lawyers will say that such destruction policies have anything to do with destroying evidence.
Of course, the lawyers know that electronic archival costs have plummeted to next to nothing.
So, from an official standpoint, I think a typically lawyer involved in a defense will say that their document destruction policies are a way to save archival expenses, and would have no ramifications in court.
You guys are morons. Should
You guys are morons.
Should Apple have all the documents it produced when designing the Apple 2? Every check, every purchase order, every shipping document?
Do you have copies of all the checks you wrote when you were in college?
Oh, wait, you haven't been to college yet.