The elderly man in the emergency room was covered with bruises, some purple and others fading to yellow.

Despite signs of dementia, he told the same story over and over: His wifes burly home health aide had beaten him. But the health aide and the wife insisted he had fallen. Now it was up to the members of Orange Countys Elder Abuse Forensic Center to decide which story was true.

As the man lay on a gurney, he was interviewed by a team from the center: a geriatrician, a social worker and an investigator from the sheriffs office. The bruises on the mans chest, they determined, were the result of being punched. There were bloody outlines of a shoe on the mans leg. His clear, consistent story, and cognitive tests, persuaded the prosecutor to charge the aide with a felony.

5 Steps for E-Mail Retention

The first five steps you should take to enact an e-mail archiving and retention plan.

The wrong time to enact an e-mail archiving and retention plan is after your company gets audited or sued. The best way to protect your company, of course, is by developing a plan for managing and legally deleting your data before something happens. For companies just starting to look at their e-mail data retention policies, here are five steps to follow:

1. Catalog your company’s data and create a list of which backup tapes are at which storage site, says Todd Stefan, principal at Setec Investigations, a computer forensics firm in Los Angeles. Knowing where to find archives will save time when discovery deadlines loom, and you’ll be able to tell a judge truthfully that you produced all the relevant data you could.

WHO: Kelly “KJ” Kuchta, president.

WHEN established: 2002.

WHAT: Litigation support, incident (data/document) response, information security, electronic discovery consulting and expert witness testimony. “Enron really tipped the scale,” Kuchta said. “Somewhere around 97 percent of business documents today are never committed to paper. Enron showed everyone the importance of the e-trail.”

A few years ago I did a short stint in the US offices of a Japanese company. I worked with a woman that had been with the company for nearly 15 years, and she never threw anything out. Drove me insane. I can’t stand clutter, and so I tend to throw away anything that doesn’t have an immediate use. She was certainly my alter-ego, never throwing anything out, even communication from when she first started with the company.

Turns out, she was right and I was wrong. Newly released e-discovery rules leave a lot of questions unanswered about how long a company is responsible for keeping electronic communications. The length of time that a company is responsible for providing such communications is left to be determined at the time that a civil suit is filed. Hmmm…

Failure to comply could be costly

New rules for electronic discovery of documents in civil cases go into effect in December — and they could cost users millions or even billions of dollars if they fail to comply.Last September, the Judicial Conference of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure recommended changes that force companies involved in a civil lawsuit to sit down and hammer out what records are fair game for electronic discovery.

In general, the resulting 300-plus page document describing the new e-discovery criteria says that companies involved in civil litigation must meet within the first 30 days of a case’s filing to discuss how to handle electronic data. The discussion must encompass retention practices, the types of records required and their electronic format, as well as what is considered “accessible” data, said John Bace, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.

Failure to comply with the new rules could be costly.

The world was a very different place in 1849 when Henry David Thoreau exclaimed – admittedly in a broader context – that “[the] process of discovery is very simple.” Today discovery is anything but – especially with a digital revolution on our hands.

Who falls for this stuff?

Who’s so greedy or naive to get suckered by those Nigerian scams that litter inboxes and spam filters with rubbish so clearly a ruse you’d have to be a knucklehead or on drugs not to just delete ‘em?

That’s the question people ask. Readers raise it all the time. Whenever the column or talk turns to swindles and the Nigerian e-mail nonsense in particular, they want to know: Who could possibly fall for this?

You might be surprised.

The First Litigation Support Electronic Discovery Software Program with Embedded Files Processing Capability for Law Firms, In-House Counsel, Service Bureaus and CPA Practices

Winter Haven, FL (PRWEB) June 9, 2006 — Litigation support document management software creator DocuLex announces the anticipated update of Discovery Cracker, the company’s flagship electronic discovery software program, the first to offer embedded files processing capability. “Designed specifically for litigation support use by law firms, corporate counsel, service bureaus and CPA firms, the program creates litigation databases with associated images and full-text and metadata extraction from email systems and stored electronic files in over 500 formats,” states Tim Nissen, Marketing Director of DocuLex. “Product hallmarks include ease-of-use, scalability, usage flexibility, custom file report creation ability and distribution processing capability.” read more »

If a child disappears, his eyes can help identify him. The Weber County Sheriff’s Office has access to new technology, that may help find missing children, using iris recognition technology. Our eyes are the most unique features on our body and can more accurately identify us than our fingerprint.

Zax Anderson and his seven-year old sister know all about stranger danger. Their father is in law enforcement.

Capt. Klint Anderson: “There’s all sorts of rules about wandering away from the family, where you go, letting my wife and I know where they’re at.”

Project Leadership Associates, Inc. (PLA), continues to meet the demands of the legal industry and corporate counsel by offering a Computer Forensics Training Session in Chicago on Tuesday, June 27th.

Computer Forensics 101 is a free training session hosted by PLA. Their introduction to Computer Forensics is designed for attorneys, corporate counsel, paralegals and litigation support personnel from both law firms and corporate legal departments.

• Group for Private Investigators
• Group for Process Servers