U.S. judge orders General Re to provide internal records
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A U.S. judge has ordered the General Re Corp reinsurance unit of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc  to produce internal investigation records in a criminal trial of its former chief executive next month.
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A military judge on Saturday ordered the former commander of U.S. prisons in Iraq to testify at the trial of a soldier who says he was ordered to abuse detainees at Abu Ghraib.
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(InfoWorld) - Six months afterÂ new federal e-discovery rulesÂ took effect in the U.S., some businesses are still unclear on what they have to do to comply. Under the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure (FRCP), which took effect Dec. 1, 2006, businesses need to have policies in place on how they will produce electronic documents they holdÂ in the event of a federal court lawsuit. But an analyst with the research firm Gartner says it may take "many more years" for companies to come fully into compliance. "Some of them are lured into a kind of false sense of security," said John Bace, senior vice president of research at Gartner. "They think, 'We have only had to do e-discovery one or two times in the last 10 years so I don't know if we need to go through all of this rigamarole.'' Large enterprises usually have systems in place because they get sued a lot, said Bace. While some firms are diligently implementing changes, others aren't paying enough attention to these issues. Xiotech, a vendor of file management technology, said that in a survey of 166 businesses conducted in March and April, only 39 percent said they had a system in place for document "holds," a demand that they protect important information from being deleted. Less than 25 percent said they had taken steps to comply with the new FRCP rules. But companies can be hit with an e-discovery order regardless of their size. Forty-seven percent of U.S. companies with 20,000 or more employees, and 56 percent of those with between 1,000 and 4,999 employees, received document discovery orders in 2006, according to Enterprise Strategy Group. When crafting their FRCP policies, companies need to delineate how they store and retrieve electronic documents, including e-mail messages, voicemails, and even instant messages. If hit with a lawsuit requesting e-documents, companies have to meet soon after the filing to present an inventory of what electronic documents they have that may be relevant and say how quickly they can produce them. Burgess & Niple, a civil engineering firm in Columbus, Ohio, is "close" to reorganizing all its digital records, said Fred Mau, the firm's chief technology officer. Mau, who began streamlining the company's data storage long before the new rules took effect, realized he needed a better way to organize e-mail. "There is e-mail squirreled away all over the place, on the file servers, on the drives, on PCs, and if somebody lays a discovery motion on me I've gotta go find all that," he said. As a solution, the company used ZantazÂ software to replace the employee system of saving e-mail in Outlook's PST file format. Even though the Dec. 1 deadline has passed, companies should still take time to organize their systems, said Bob Little, vice president of product marketing at Zantaz, which licenses e-discovery software or offers it as a subscription-based service. The sense of urgency around FRCP reminds Little of the urgency around Sarbanes-Oxley or the Y2K computer glitch. "There was an awful lot of noise being made about 'You need to do something now. This is a revolution.' And the reality is that it's not. It's an evolution of standards and practices that companies should be doing." Zantaz introduced a new software suite Monday tied to new versions of Microsoft enterprise software products, including Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint Portal Server 2007, and Internet Information Server 7.0. As it is, more business lawsuits are filed in state courts than federal, which may explain the lack of urgency, said Gregg Davis, chief information officer for Webcor Builders, a construction company. But state rules are similar to federal rules and some states are specifically adopting the new FRCP rules. Businesses need to include FRCP compliance in their ongoing IT planning, Davis said. "It will take time for this to fully filter down, but IT managers and CIOs should have this in mind." Multiple software companies have begun offering e-discovery software or services, but some focus on different areas, such as e-mail archiving, data protection, or deduplication, said Gartner's Bace. "This is a hot market but it's fragmented." Recommind, for instance, provides e-discovery technology to law firms and the legal departments of enterprises. Recommind introduced a new e-mail discovery product Tuesday. The market will remain unsettled for a while, said Marie-Charlotte Patterson, vice president of market strategy at AXS-One, a records compliance management firm. "No one company addresses all the e-discovery requirements from A to Z, so companies may be working with more than one vendor," said Patterson. Â
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The Justice Department has launched an internal inquiry into the departmentâs procedures for selecting outside monitors to police settlements with large companies.
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A federal judge scolded the Bush administration Wednesday for responding with sometimes blanket secrecy to a request for documents on its warrantless wiretapping program.
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Justice Department employees involved in a lawsuit filed on behalf of Sept. 11 detainees must disclose whether they know of any government monitoring of conversations between the detainees and their attorneys, a judge ruled Tuesday.
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WASHINGTON - A U.S. district court judge on Wednesday praised Microsoft for efforts to improve technical documentation for its communications protocols, but questioned the effect in the marketplace of her final judgment in the U.S. government's antitrust case against the software giant.
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Federal judge Victor Marrero who presides US District Court in New York City struct down Wednesday a key part of the US Patriot Act which granted to the FBI surveillance powers to demand company records from businesses without court approval as
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A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Bush administration to tell him whether two CIA interrogation videos destroyed in 2005 were relevant to his case.
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December 01, 2004 - The US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday issued an exemptive order to grant certain accelerated filers up to an additional 45-days to include in their annual reports managementâs report on internal
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The special master appointed to hear evidence from both parties in the AMD v. Intel antitrust case has recommended that Intel be compelled to produce documents for evidence that it had previously declined to submit. If Judge Joseph A. Farnan, Jr., agrees, Intel may be asked to produce evidence of what AMD alleges to be "foreign misconduct" on Intel's part.
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A federal judge ruled yesterday that White House visitor logs created by the Secret Service are public records, and he ordered information involving the visits of nine conservative Christian leaders with Bush administration officials to be released to an advocacy group.
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The federal judge presiding over the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby ruled this morning that the public is entitled to hear audiotapes of Libby's testimony before the grand jury that investigated the 2003 leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity.
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A federal judge yesterday called the Bush administration's handling of a Hurricane Katrina housing program "a legal disaster" and ordered officials to explain a computer system that can neither precisely count evacuees nor provide reasons they were denied aid.
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General Re Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., acknowledged that it has received a request from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to provide documentation and information relating to non-traditional or
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The Bush administration asked an appeals court yesterday to overrule a federal judge and allow the White House to keep secret any records of visitors to Vice President Dick Cheney's residence and office.
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NEWARK, NJ Aug. 20, 2004  A judge on Friday ordered a psychiatric evaluation for a doctor who told reporters he had an affair with the former aide accusing Gov. James E. McGreevey of sexual harassment.