On the Mark

If you didn’t notice the recent NY Law Journal article written by Joel Stashenko, Joel gives a great recap of the recent opinion in PSEG Power New York, Inc. v. Alberici Constructors, Inc., 1:05-cv-657 and he interviews some of the players in the case. This is a really good article and is worth taking a few minutes to read.

In the opinion Magistrate Judge Randolph F. Treece touches upon not only problems as they pertain to electronic evidence issues in this case but in what many may encounter in other cases in this computer age.

In a nutshell, PSEG and their EDD vendor managed to find a way to detach emails from their attachments during the processing of their data yet was unable to put Humpty Dumpty back together again when it came to their production to Alberici. PSEG then sought monetary relief (to the tune of $206K) from Alberici for the cost of having to re-do it properly. (I know which software they didn’t use).

Well then. Request denied. (We’ll see if we can get the technical details with respect to what went wrong and report back)

Alberici was not ordered to share the cost burden and the judge agreed that having the emails with their attachments was important enough to not go forward with depositions until Alberici had them in the proper form.

I’m happy to say the basic functionality built into Metalincs would never allow this type of “Fiasco” to happen. As the father of a two year old, I know the parent / child relationship is sacred. It should be viewed that way with respect to email processing and production, too.

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