Martin Felsky

I was surprised this morning when a client collected Lotus Notes e-mail from 6 users for a very narrow timeframe – January 1, 2008 to April 18 2009 – and ended up with about 50Gb. I have yet to see the data – perhaps there’s more to this than meets the eye.

Frequently lawyers ask me to find “all e-mails” for certain custodians, in certain date ranges on certain topics. The assumption is that we look at the contents of the corporate e-mail server (usually Exchange or Notes) and the local client.
E-mails can exist in many forms however, many of which are often overlooked in superficial investigations. [...]

In the context of document discovery, many outside counsel advise their clients to search for relevant e-mails, and then print them out or burn them to a CD for review. That practice is no longer sustainable as a matter of law or practice.* By ignoring the obligation to preserve not only the content of e-mail messages but the metadata associated with them, you may be putting your clients at risk of spoliation sanctions.

Reviewers should be aware that e-mail attachments listed in an e-mail message may not appear in the review database in the same order in which they are listed. 

In global businesses and even in many “local” businesses, e-mail arrives and is delivered to and from a variety of time zones. When processing e-mail messages from desktops, or from the notebooks of travelling executives, keeping track of the correct date and time may be important for evidentiary purposes.