Preserving electronic data can be a challenge for companies with multiple data centers. However, what we have here is a failure to communicate. The case at issue is an ERISA class action against UnumProvident. On November 26, plaintiffs’ counsel wrote to request a conference to present their request for a preservation. The court then outlined principles that would serve as the basis for the parties’ draft of a proposed order. The court observed, without contradiction from UnumProvident, that UnumProvident already had a duty to preserve any tapes containing emails as of November 4, the date litigation commenced.

The order required all back-up tapes or other back-up hard drives, disks or other hardware containing material back-up by the defendants regarding Y2K, regardless of the date or dates of the internal or external e-mails, computer information, or electronic media contained thereon to be preserved. Specifically the plaintiffs requested all internal and external e-mails, generated, created, or dated October 14, 15, and 16 of 2002, and November 18, 19, and 20 of 2002. If the defendants alleged these e-mails were no longer in existence due to routine destruction or otherwise, the defendants had to provide an affidavit explaining circumstances of the unavailability.

UnumProvident’s Enterprise Security Architect decided instead of preserved the data to implement a special “snapshot” back-up which would back-up those emails that were on the system as of the day or days the snapshot was taken. UnumProvident could also have directed IBM, their data vendor, to copy email back-up tapes from existing unexpired tapes to other back-up tapes that would contain no expiration date. Similarly, it could have copied the data onto a hard drive or into other computer media. Instead, this snapshot inadvertently caused all of the data on the back-up tapes to be overwritten.

The court found that no enterprise officers of UnumProvident had sufficient expertise to discuss the preservation project in a meaningful way. Neither of them took the steps that they needed to take to get sufficiently informed advice on the issues involved. Similarly, there was insufficient supervision of the Enterprise Software Architect’s efforts. The officer had also never ordered IBM to preserve emails regarding the six dates. Additionally, the law department of UnumProvident never instructed its officers to confirm that email for the six days had been preserved by IBM.

As this issue developed relatively early in discovery, the court found it difficult to determine the extent to which the plaintiffs have suffered any prejudice from the failure to capture all of the UnumProvident emails for the six days. Throughout the whole opinion, the court was very skeptical of the testimony of UnumProvident’s officers. The court determined most of UnumProvident’s actions were inadequate. However, it also determined the accelerated expiration problem that occurred because of the creation of the snapshot was inadvertent and unintended. Therefore, the court did not award any sanctions. It can still be assumed the court would be less trusting of UnumProvident after this debacle and less likely to give them the benefit of the doubt.