Guidance Software logo Guidance Software finds itself in the news after an article on Cassondra Todd’s suit by Jessica Mintz of the Associated Press is carried by major news services including FOXNews. In this case, the plaintiff, Todd, was able to produce emails that were not produced by Guidance. Guidance maintained an email archive but a search index became corrupted more than a year before litigation began making the data not easily accessible even though it still existed on backup tapes. It appears the not easily accessible data was not identified until after Todd was able to produce email not found by Guidance.

One of the technology issues in this case is that some email archives maintain many non-overlapping, atomic search indexes. Often times, one or more of these indexes will become corrupt or otherwise unavailable. When this happens, data handled by that index may simply not be returned as part of an E-Discovery search. Organizations engaged in E-Discovery may now wish to request an index corruption log listing inaccessible search indexes as well as the email covered by those indexes as part of their E-Discovery protocol.

Another question is whether the email metadata was accessible via another method such as a SQL query search. Many email archives use different technologies for fulltext indexes (e.g. Lucene, dtSearch, Alta Vista, etc.) and for relational data (e.g. MS SQL, Oracle RDBMS, etc.). Even if the fulltext index failed, a SQL query may be able to show how many emails were in the archive during a certain time period and associated with certain custodians and subjects.

There is a limited amount of information available in this case; however, the players and technology issues make it with studying. A brief timeline of this case has been assembled based on the available, but incomplete, public information for a quick overview of the case.