Press Releases

Enron Emails Now Available for Public Analysis

MetaLINCS E-Discovery Software Allows Anyone to Explore Enron's Email Secrets Ahead of Landmark Trial

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.,—January 18, 2005—MetaLINCS™, a leading provider of E-Discovery software, today announced availability of a free, trial version of the MetaLINCS E-Discovery application that lets users quickly access, review and analyze more than 300,000 real Enron email messages. This cache of electronic content was used initially by the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission to investigate Enron's manipulation of the western region energy market, and will likely play a key role in the upcoming trials of former Enron executives Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay.

Electronic information is now the #1 source of evidence in all corporate investigations. Using the MetaLINCS software available for download at www.metalincs.com, anyone can easily explore this unique email database, utilizing a professional and highly graphical E-Discovery search and analysis tool. The MetaLINCS software can quickly reveal relationships between key individuals in the Enron scandal and important related concepts, activities, events, dates, and people..

Former Enron Chairman Ken Lay and CEO Jeff Skilling will face a jury trial in the coming months for fraud and conspiracy charges. Former Enron accounting Chief Richard A. Causey struck a plea agreement with prosecutors in December and will testify against Lay and Skilling. The trial, set to begin with jury selection later this month will focus on email evidence pulled from Enron's nearly 1.5 million email message database.

"Analyzing electronic messages is now central to most corporate litigations," said George Socha, president of Socha Consulting. "Most business strategies and processes are executed and recorded through email communication. Enron's email will provide a blueprint of the organization's operations, relationships between people, and facts key to the corporation's eventual collapse."

"Much of the information buried within the email messages of large corporate trials, such as the Enron trial, has remained inaccessible due to slow, error-prone manual review processes," said Ramon Nunez, CEO of MetaLINCS. "MetaLINCS makes E-Discovery faster and more efficient, enabling investigators and corporate counsel to gain an early, accurate assessment of all electronic documents. MetaLINCS' advanced E-Discovery capabilities move beyond simple search to automated analysis of key people, events and communications."

Visitors to the MetaLINCS website will be able to analyze the Enron email database in the following ways:

• People Analysis—Discover and understand the relationships between the scandal's different players.
• Thread Analysis—Understand conversations and email trails in context by analyzing entire threads, and find the incriminating evidence inherent to a thread's tangential messages.
• Guided Core Analysis—Let the MetaLINCS application dynamically guide your analysis by suggesting additional key words and phrases and automatically discovering relevant terminology used in documents and messages.

Analysis of electronic data is the most critical aspect of the E-Discovery process, yet most investigations continue to rely on manual review of each document supported only by conventional text search techniques for gathering topical information. Often done through tedious, manual processes, traditional analysis is labor-intensive, expensive, inconsistent and often incomplete. This year alone, companies will spend over $5.7 billion in expenses related to E- Discovery. As the volume and importance of electronic data grows, impractical manual analysis is quickly increasing risks for legal counsel. MetaLINCS technology fully leverages the rich content and metadata from electronic sources while minimizing cost and human error.

For more information, contact:

David Downing 650-269-7286 david.downing@metalincs.com		Rebecca Passo SHIFT Communications 617-779-1817 rpasso@shiftcomm.com