e-Lessons Learned

I want the truth! YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH! Those two lines are from the movie A Few Good Men. They also have particular relevance to ediscovery best practices.

In A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, discovered that Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) – proponent of the YOU CAN’T HANDLE line – had ordered the original page from an Air Force base flight log to be destroyed after it was reproduced to depict slightly different information in an effort to cover up his wrongdoing. Although the alteration of the flight log was not itself direct evidence of wrongdoing, it did lead Tom Cruise to infer that the altered flight log adversely affected the prosecution’s case, and ultimately, to that courtroom scene.

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Cloud Computing, a computer networking model that gives users on-demand access to shared software applications and data storage, is becoming increasingly popular among businesses and individuals. For example, if you use Google’s Gmail for your email and calendaring, or Snapfish for your online photo sharing and storage; or if your business remotely stores data with a third-party server provider like Salesforce, or uses Windows Azure to create and host web applications and services, you’re already “floating in the cloud.” This alert surveys U.S. cases that have direct implications for cloud users.

I. Using a Cloud May Increase the Possibility That You Will Have to Fend Off a Lawsuit in Another State

In order to be sued in a state where you do not reside, or where your business is not incorporated or headquartered, the court must have “personal jurisdiction” over you, i.e., the power to force you to come to court. In assessing whether a defendant has “sufficient contacts” with a particular state to be sued there, the use of a cloud computing program could expose you to greater risk of being sued successfully in that state. Continue reading »