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Letter to the Editor of Law.com

On Friday, August 10th, Law.com published an article that, without some clarification, we believe has the potential to unnecessarily scare anyone who works on electronic discovery matters, regardless of whether using in-house solutions or any outside service provider. In case you were one of those who may have been alarmed by the article, we wanted to share with you the Letter to the Editor Applied Discovery submitted to Law.com in response.

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August 11, 2006

Dear Editor:

We would like to address a number of factual errors contained in an article published in the August 10, 2006 online issue of Law.com titled, "Software Glitch May Have Erased E-Mail Text in Enron Suits."

This story alleges that "a software bug may have erased text in emails produced for electronic document production being handled by Applied Discovery in the Enron civil suit." In fact, the Microsoft Outlook 2003 bug in question does not erase anything. The bug causes Outlook 2000 emails to appear blank on computers without a patch that Microsoft issued as part of its Office 2003 Service Pack 2 in September 2005. This bug affected what appears to be less than one-tenth of one percent of email documents.

To set the record straight:
  1. No data was lost as a result of this issue. The anomaly simply prevented the text of certain emails created with a prior version of Outlook from being displayed in Outlook 2003. This is no longer an issue for clients who have deployed Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2003.


  2. In the Outlook 2000 emails impacted by this bug the To, From, Subject Matter fields and attachments are completely viewable.


  3. We believe that less than .01% of the email documents reviewed by Applied Discovery for clients before deployment of Service Pack 2 were impacted and that 99.99% of all email materials were correctly identified and fully disclosed in the discovery process. No other materials appear to have been impacted by this issue.


  4. We have been working closely with Microsoft throughout this situation to address the needs and concerns of our clients and maintain the sanctity of our e-discovery process. In addition to fixing the anomaly with Service Pack 2, Microsoft has also worked with Applied Discovery to develop a tool that will help us determine whether any of your emails were improperly displayed as the result of this issue. Jeanne Sheldon, a Corporate Vice President working on Microsoft Office, commented that, "We believe that Service Pack 2 resolved this issue. We appreciate that Applied Discovery has been fully committed to teaming with our software development group upon learning of this issue to find the most complete and expedient means to resolve it."


  5. Applied Discovery does not use Microsoft Outlook to search email as part of its e-Discovery process, but only to help display e-mail.
If you have questions about this issue or Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack, Microsoft's Support Website provides additional information at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906451/en-us. If you have questions about a project with Applied Discovery, please feel free to contact us at applieddiscovery@applieddiscovery.com or call your Applied Discovery account manager or sales representative.

Sincerely,



Scott Nagel
Vice President, Managing Director
LexisNexis® Applied Discovery®



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