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.

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.

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.”

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…

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.

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.

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.”

Discovery Cracker’s embedded files processing feature provides extraction of electronic file formats from within another files. The benefit is thorough electronic capture of content from container files of differing native formats (IE. a Microsoft Word document containing an Excel spreadsheet), separating the embedded file from the previous multi-format location.

The program provides full-text and metadata extraction from files in over 500 formats, with ‘parent-child’ document relationship identification for effective organization. Expanded SQL server support for faster processing, along with Microsoft Access data extraction are included in this Microsoft 2003-supported version. The program exports data to all prominent litigation content management systems.

A DocuLex Discovery Cracker Online User’s Forum is located at www.doculex.com/forum. A new email-access product support program has been launched; email e-mail protected from spam bots.

About DocuLex, Inc.

Winter Haven, Florida-based DocuLex is a pioneer in litigation support document imaging software, providing document capture, image processing and electronic discovery programs to users throughout the world. For company, product and support information, see www.doculex.com/electronicdiscovery.asp.

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.”

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.