Umbrella Rulings Can't Cover All Data

When is enough preservation too much? Many legal professionals cringed when Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Chooljian of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, held that the duty to preserve required the activation of a logging function to enable the retention of serve log data in random access memory, where the information that would be captured by that step was predictably at the heart of a highly contested copyright infringement case. See Columbia Pictures Industries v. Justin Bunnell, Case No. CV 06-1093 FMC(JCx), 2007 U.S. Dist. Lexis 46364 (May 29, 2007).

Critics charge that the decision misconstrues the intent of the 2006 electronic data discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and presages an unwarranted expansion of data preservation requirements.

How the IT department can prep for the courtroom

The mountains of electronic data generated within today’s enterprises are colliding with ever more aggressive legal discovery practices, creating formidable IT challenges during litigation - how to best provide secure and auditable access to sensitive corporate data that must otherwise remain inaccessible to both outsiders and most insiders. More importantly, how can control be maintained without exposing more corporate data than necessary?

These decisions are best shared between the network or IT manager, corporate counsel and a litigation support specialist, who will help identify and specify the appropriate data. But it’s the IT manager’s job to ensure that data is treated gingerly; enterprises don’t spend millions on network security only to offer up the corporate jewels at the first lawsuit.