Quarter Inch Cartridge

Quarter Inch Cartridges (QIC) are an old form of tape storage in use since the 1970s, which you may still come across during electronic discovery.

In may be necessary to rewind a QIC cartridge from beginning to end in order to get it to function properly. Drives used to access QIC cartridges that use a SCSI cable should have a retension command you can use.

Quarter Inch Cartridges can range in size from 20 MB to 40 GB. Mini-QICs, QIC-40s and QIC-80s can be accessed with a standard floppy drive.

Model Rule 3.3 and Electronic Discovery

The American Bar Association's Model Rule 3.3 imposes a duty of candor on attorneys requiring them to, "offer evidence that the lawyer knows to be false. If a lawyer, the lawyer’s client, or a witness called by the lawyer, has offered material evidence and the lawyer comes to know of its falsity, the lawyer shall take reasonable remedial measures, including, if necessary, disclosure to the tribunal."

Rule 3.3 is relevant to electronic discovery with respect to a counsel's discussion of his or her client's ability to locate electronically stored information; the thoroughness of a search performed by a client of its network data; and contents of electronic productions. See a post on the ABA's site here.

Obligations under Rule 3.3 may override an attorney's duty to protect the confidentiality of a client's data.

A decision by Judge Joy Flowers Conti of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania quoted Rule 3.3 of the Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct, "failure to make a disclosure is the equivalent of an affirmative misrepresentation." Hohider v. UPS, 257 F.R.D. 80, 82 (W.D. Pa. 2009). Judge Conti faulted the Defendant for failing to be candid with her about its preservation. "For example, defendant's counsel wrote a letter to plaintiffs' counsel in 2005 stating that defendant was 'in the process of placing a 'Hold,' as that term is defined in the UPS Records Manual, on all categories of documents requested by Plaintiffs in the litigation.' (J. Culleiton letter to C. Bagin at 3-4, May 3, 2005.) It was also represented to plaintiffs' counsel that defendant was 'even going a step further and disseminating a memorandum to applicable managers throughout the Company which describes the litigation and further details the records that are to be held from destruction.' (Id.) Defendant, however, did not issue the hold at that time, did not disseminate the hold memorandum, and it did not advise plaintiffs of its failure to do so. " Id.

Emails Purged From Outlook May Still Exist

After an email is deleted from the Deleted Items folder, or removed from the Inbox with SHIFT + DELETE, the email will be sent to the Deletions subfolder of the Recoverable Items Folder. The Recoverable Items Folder is not visible to the user. Each user's profile contains a deleted item retention period set by the admin. The default is 14 days. So, in most cases emails can be recovered for up to 14 days after a user has tried to delete them. The 'Recover Deleted Items' command is on the Folder tab of Outlook.

If an email is purged from the Recovered Deleted Items folder, or if the set retention period elapses, it is sent to the Purges subfolder of the Recoverable Items Folder. However, the email will not be removed from the Purges folder until the mailbox assistant processes the folder. A post on Microsoft's official site for Exchange states that: "You can configure the Managed Folder Assistant to process all mailboxes on a Mailbox server within a certain period (known as a work cycle). The work cycle is set to one day by default."