Intel Faces Up to E-Mail Retention Problems in AMD Lawsuit - ' Financial Services Companies Ahead '

Financial Services Companies Ahead of the Curve

In financial services, where Smith said LiveOffice has been very busy in the last five years, this "redundant" type of archiving system is now commonplace.

"They [the financial services companies] have the systems in place, they're doing audit requests and legal discovery on a regular basis," Smith said. "This new [federal] guideline really shifts the burden to companies now. No judge is going to say, 'What do you mean, you don't have e-mail?'—especially to a technology company like Intel."

eWEEK obtained a copy of a letter Intel sent to AMD and to Farnan on March 6. In it, the company said that despite a companywide effort to comply with AMD's requests for evidentiary documents—including tape backups of more than 1,000 of its employees' correspondence documents—the company admitted there were "inadvertent mistakes in the implementation" of its preservation process.

For example, some employees obeyed the request to save their e-mails to a backup hard drive but did not save their "sent" e-mail folders—only the "incoming" mail folder. As a result, those "sent" e-mails were purged as part of Intel's regular maintenance program. In the letter, Intel also said a few employees didn't follow the directive at all because they believed the IT department was automatically saving their e-mails on its own.

In the letter, Intel also said that it is reviewing its document-retention efforts related to former employees, because there "may be some lapses."

"We have been very transparent all along in this process," Intel media relations officer Chuck Mulloy told eWEEK. "We know we have some issues, but we've explained it all very clearly and are going to rectify the situation as quickly as possible."

Goodwin said that in an ironic way, Intel's issues are "good for our business, and excellent for companies who use SAAS."

"This is bringing a lot of attention to the importance of e-mail archiving," Goodwin said. "If one of the most respected, powerful IT companies in the world can have this problem, what about all the rest of us?"

Editor's Note: This story was updated to include information about a deadline given to Intel by a federal judge.

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