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Intel has a month to search for lost e-mails

Tom Krazit Former Staff writer, CNET News
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Google, as the most prominent company on the Internet defends its search juggernaut while expanding into nearly anything it thinks possible. He has previously written about Apple, the traditional PC industry, and chip companies. E-mail Tom.
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Tom Krazit
2 min read

The judge overseeing the Advanced Micro Devices-Intel antitrust case has given Intel 30 days to figure out which e-mails it failed to preserve as part of a lapse in document retention, and to submit a report to the court.

On Monday, Intel disclosed that its document-retention policies might have failed to preserve a number of e-mails that should have been retained following AMD's complaint, which was filed in June 2005. In many cases, those individuals on Intel's document-retention list failed to save their sent e-mails to their hard drive, but other lapses also occurred, Intel told the court in a letter.

Intel must figure out what is missing and deliver a full report to the court by April 10, according to reports. There's a chance that Intel might be able to recover some of the e-mails on backup tapes, but "we have a lot of work ahead of us," said spokesman Chuck Mulloy following the hearing.

The court could decide to sanction Intel, depending on the circumstances of what it can recover. The court noted that the mistakes appeared to be due to "human error," according to Mulloy and reports.

But as might be expected, an AMD statement following the hearing was unsympathetic, damning Intel with faint praise.

"Today, Intel began to account for its destruction of potentially massive amounts of evidence, reaching to the highest executive levels of the company. Given the obvious implications to the administration of justice, it is exactly right that Intel must now prepare a full accounting, fashion an effective remedy, and be accountable for the loss of evidence."