Comments on: The DOJ versus e-mail

By: Artisan

Artisan — Thu, 26 May 2005 06:52:59 +0000

Not so long ago, in 2003, Frank Quattrone, top trader at CSFB went to jail(!) under similar circumstances.
I believe what convinced the Jury the most about him being guilty, was to hear how much money he was making (can’t remember, was it 20 or 200 millions a year?).
You have to remember the Tom Wolfe story, written 20 years ago, or at least see the movie adaptation, “Bonfire of Vanity”…
Life copies Art.

By: David

David — Sun, 22 May 2005 18:58:06 +0000

“Note that the judgment was not directly because of the failure to produce email, it was for the fraud.”
Only no fraud was ever proven â€“ the judge simply assumed that Morgan Stanley was guilty because it could not produce the records he demanded.

“it isn’t different in kind to keeping a receipt’
Email records are very different from financial transactions. For one, there are billions of emails sent by businesses every single day. Individual emails are not categorized or stored in a central location, so keeping a record of emails requires a huge archive and categorization of every single email by the relevant categories. This is possible, but it’s very costly and not fool-proof. Can you find an email from five years ago in your email? Can everyone else in your organization?

By: tz

tz — Sun, 22 May 2005 15:33:02 +0000

Note that the judgment was not directly because of the failure to produce email, it was for the fraud.

If any court (even under a libertarian system) tells you to produce evidence, and you don’t, it can be construed that there was something incriminating.

While the requirement might be excessive (there are archival services), it isn’t different in kind to keeping a receipt in order to return a defective item to a store or something else that proves a transaction.

By: Skip Oliva

Skip Oliva — Fri, 20 May 2005 15:26:25 +0000

In a recent Federal Trade Commission “administrative” case, staff lawyers sought judgment without trial because of alleged “document destruction” by the defendant company, which in fact was nothing more than a routine execution of the firm’s document retention policy. The FTC staff’s argument was that the unretained e-mailes might have proven the government’s case, but since we’ll never know, the only proper course of action was to declare the company guilty. Thankfully the administrative judge disagreed with this approach.