Court-appointed Special Master Vincent J. Poppiti has ordered Intel to turn certain documents over to AMD as part of the company's ant-trust lawsuit against the Santa Clara-based CPU manufacturer. These papers contain information pertaining to Intel's document retention policy, and the information they contain could play an important role in the trial to come.
The policy in question was drawn up by Intel as soon as the company learned of AMD's lawsuit. This is standard operating procedure for any company, and Intel's policy included ordering its 4,000 sales and marketing employees to retain any and all information related to its competition with AMD, in addition to further "hold" orders given to some 1,500 employees. In the fall of 2005, Intel began preserving backup tapes containing e-mails that might be of relevance to the case. These tapes were characterized as a fall-back, secondary preservation system, in the event that any given e-mail could not be retrieved from an individual's computer.
Intel's policy may have seemed sufficient on paper, but its actual implementation left much to be desired.
