DOMINO'S SAYS CUSTOMER DATABASE TOO PRIVATE TO SHARE

Having an enormous database of customers, cell phone numbers and addresses from around the country, Domino's Pizza LLC is subject to speculation about abuse of that personal information.
One such article was in a CNET news article, The Internet, a Private Eye's Best Friend. A Brooklyn private investigator, Steven Rambam, observes in the article that the Internet is a goldmine for getting personal information. The article elaborates, "Rambam also gets information from marketing databases that gather information on people's buying habits and preferences from frequent-customer cards, surveys, product registrations, actual transactions, and other activities." It then quotes Rambam, saying, "Domino's has built the biggest consumer database in America, and the U.S. Marshals Service, the New York Police Department and collection agencies are using it to track people down."
Responding to a phone call from Blue MauMau and a follow-up email, Mr. Tim McIntyre, Vice President of Communications at Domino's, issued this statement a few minutes ago that such claims are simply not true.
"We do not sell or give away our customer lists to anyone, despite what this individual claims. He's grossly misinformed. Our customer lists are too important to us, and the trust we have with our customers is too valuable to break. There is no upside for us at all in sharing the information.
There have been a few instances in which our legal department has received subpoenas from law enforcement agencies who want to tie a specific address to a cell phone number. In those cases, we only provide that information - we do not share entire lists. Any business receiving a subpoena from a law enforcement agency is going to cooperate, of course. In the cases in which we have cooperated, the information has led to the arrest of drug dealers and murderers.For that, we will not apologize.
As for the accusation that we share information with collection agencies: again, false. Do we use this information to collect money owed to us? Yes, occasionally. That is the only time we would use that kind of information. We do not sell or share it with others.

Reduce litigation risk, cut costs with proactive eDiscovery

Getting a Handle on eDiscovery“Discovery” is the legal process that all companies facing lawsuits are required to go through in order to produce relevant documents for the court to consider. Generally, any company with $1B in revenue faces multiple legal matters. They may be spurious, or legitimate—but for good-sized companies, they’re inevitable. What’s notable is that those companies spend between $2.5 million and $4 million a year on legal discovery of electronic files alone.
What’s driving those costs? Part of it is an increase in the number of lawsuits. Part of it are the new regulations that enterprises have to comply with in the wake of Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco. But probably the most important factor driving the increase in legal discovery costs is the rapid growth of electronic data that is generated and stored by companies as part of their ongoing business operations. While technology has made our lives at work easier and more productive, it has also contributed to the proliferation of electronically stored information (ESI). To make things more complicated, as much as 90% of all that information is unstructured and unmanaged. Most companies do not have well defined information management policies in place to manage the explosive growth of this data. This is a recipe that can lead to huge litigation costs later for companies when they have to reactively dig through mountains of information to provide timely responses for eDiscovery requests.

Web 2.0 Collides With E-Discovery

You have received a document request from opposing counsel. Among the various items of calendar entries and e-mails requested is a request for "Any and all social networking or business networking information related to the key player(s)."

This raises questions of what is in scope, where is it, how much is enough, and who is responsible for producing it? Welcome to the collision between Web 2.0 and electronic data discovery.

Qualcomm Repute Had Been Violated By Legal Losses

Qualcomm was drowned by the issue of e-discovery misbehavior which had an impact on client, though it is a base line to E-discovery. The U.S district court of California issued a warning to the entire corporate litigant’s regarding the electronically stored documents and E-mails in the recent issues of Qualcomm faulty.

School Districts Wrestling with ABCs of E-Discovery, Compliance

School districts face a mandate to keep electronic information accessible for e-discovery and public records searches. But for many public schools, confusion about the legal requirements and a lack of funding present roadblocks to data compliance.

Is Your Data Wide Open to Your Opponent?

Information technology departments of sophisticated organizations are already aware that each party to a litigation in the United States is obligated to collect its own discoverable electronic information to be produced to the opposing party.

Software Minimizes Risks Related to eDiscovery

Custodian Collector Option provides single solution to rapidly search, retrieve, preserve, and assess critical content owned by data custodians with potentially relevant electronically stored information. It can scan file shares, laptops, and desktops.

EDD Demands Set Global Trap

Intellectual property litigators are, by their very nature, interdisciplinary creatures who weave together different strands of the law to effectively advocate for their clients. Lately, however, the fabric of successful litigation has gotten a little more frayed by the pulls of globalization, e-discovery and data protection.

On Aug. 24, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California affirmed a critical May 29 discovery decision by the magistrate judge in Columbia Pictures Industries v. Bunnell. While this decision has received much attention in e-discovery circles, the court's ruling on random access memory has overshadowed a larger lesson about international e-discovery and the impossible decision that may face IP litigators: to choose between potentially violating the law of a foreign country and risking discovery sanctions at home.

Group Creates Standard to Ease E-discovery Data Transfer

The Electronic Discovery Reference Model standards group today unveiled an XML-based standard that it says will allow documents transfer through the systems of multiple vendors during the various stages of e-discovery.

The new standard defines metadata of e-mail and files for simplified transfer to and from applications that are used as part of an e-discovery process by businesses, service providers and outside legal firms, said Kurt Leafstrand, a spokesman for the two-year-old standards group.

FAQ: Changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Affect Storage Plans

If you’re an IT professional who’s also interested in legal affairs, there has never been a better time to blend the two worlds. With the amendments in December 2006 to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), IT has become inextricable from the discovery process of corporate litigation.

“IT has to be a part of most of these matters because, regardless of whether it’s sexual harassment or slip-and-fall, it all involves some level of electronic information,” says Brian Babineau, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group Inc.

EDD Bytes to Feed Your Firm's Knowledge

Last December's revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, addressing discovery of electronically stored information, underscored the fact that no lawyer today can afford to ignore e-discovery. No matter the case, no matter the court, digital data is likely to be implicated.

That means lawyers urgently need to understand electronic data discovery and keep abreast of developments in the field. In this month's column, the first of two parts on EDD, we look at some of the more useful Web sites for learning about and keeping current with this essential area of practice. Next month in part two, we will survey EDD blogs and look at some vendors' sites that include useful resources.

Defuse Firm Fear and Disarm EDD Vendors

There's no question about it, electronic data discovery is generating huge revenues for vendors and gigantic headaches for corporations and their lawyers. There's outright fear and confusion as everybody struggles to understand -- and corral -- this critical litigation technology.

When Law Technology News first introduced our EDD Showcases in 2002, we scoured the Web and came up with 55 vendors. Just five years later, there are more than 600 providers. And the money is breathtaking: The 2007 Socha/Gelbmann EDD Survey, released in August, pronounced that EDD is now a $2 billion business -- that will double by 2009.

HP Aims to Make E-Discovery Easier

The HP Integrated Archival Platform is a part of the company's Business Technology portfolio and is designed to help mitigate risk in electronic data discovery and compliance. It's also designed to lower costs through better use of data center assets. The new platform is designed to make a single point to manage e-discovery by providing the infrastructure and tools to store, search and retrieve e-mails, documents and images.

Electronic Data Discovery is Hot Business

In 1987, there was one business dedicated solely to providing electronic data discovery (EDD) services. In 1992, there were about five more. In 2000, there were about 40. Today, there are over 600 offerings, or purporting to offer, these services. They range in size from very large enterprises, to one or two people.
So say George Socha and Thomas Gelbmann, two St. Paul-based law technology consultants who have studied the wildfire expansion of the EDD industry for the past five years.

RenewData Launches Data Migration Service for e-Discovery

RenewData Launches Data Migration Service for e-Discovery: "The migration of legacy e-mails using ActiveVault conversion engine employs a legally defensible process and results in a unified archive to support e-discovery actions.

E-discovery services provider RenewData on May 21 announced the launch of a new data migration system that locates and consolidates old e-mail into a new searchable archive to create a centralized repository suitable for legal discovery.

Data Migration Services is designed to eliminate costs and risks associated with maintaining old e-mail on backup tapes or in a previous e-mail archiving system, marketing director Jake Frazier told eWEEK."

The Data Boom: Can Law Firms Profit?

Legal Technology - The Data Boom: Can Law Firms Profit?: "In the fall of 2005, a small Israeli technology startup came to San Francisco's Morrison & Foerster with a lawsuit -- and, soon enough, a problem.

The company had been mired in a contract dispute with one of its business partners, a huge American tech concern, and, unable to reach a settlement, was taking the matter to court.

The stakes weren't particularly high -- just a few million dollars. But after the case was filed, the defendant hit back with an electronic discovery request -- every relevant e-mail, Microsoft Word file, spreadsheet, you name it -- so onerous that its cost alone would take a fair chunk of any judgment.

'We saw that it was going to take several hundred thousand dollars to do this,' says Oz Benamram, director of knowledge management and Israel practice counsel at MoFo. In fact, there was nothing terribly unique about this situation. As more correspondence and information is stored electronically, e-discovery is requiring more time, and more dollars, than ever before."

Storage Tip: The authenticity of a found document

storage.itworld.com - Storage Tip: The authenticity of a found document: "What seems to be the problem? Your IT organization has put in place proper procedures for deleting electronic documents, including e-mails. So it is no surprise when as a result of litigation your e-discovery process cannot turn up a particular document. However, to everyone's surprise the document turns up on your CEO's laptop. This is a very possible scenario. You must know whether the document is admissible as evidence in a civil lawsuit.

What do you need to know? Evidence is admitted in court only if it can be shown that the evidence is authentic. Authentic data must follow a chain-of-custody. So how does this work with a lost document that has now been found?

My expertise is storage, not litigation support, so I turned to AdamsGrayson Consulting, a dedicated e-discovery and data retention planning firm in Washington, D.C., as a resource. AdamsGrayson kindly provided me with the necessary information to answer the question. "