Here’s an interesting (and lengthy) blog post on the case Lawson v. Sun Microsystems, Inc. 2010 WL 503054 (S.D. Ind. February 8, 2010).

Essentially, during the course of ediscovery in this case, defense counsel decided they were going to produce some privileged ediscovery in a password-protected format.  Plaintiff (not plaintiff’s counsel) then proceeds to crack the password (if you don’t know much about password-cracking, let’s just say that it can be more trivial than one might think), and then informs his attorneys about it, with an email titled, “Password protected files – Unlocked!”

Yeah, that’s going to anger some people, namely opposing counsel, who moved for sanctions.  As it turns out, everyone was at fault.  The plaintiff obviously shouldn’t have been cracking open privileged documents, plaintiff’s counsel had never even read or noticed the email, and defense counsel really shouldn’t have been producing privileged documents anyway.

I suggest you read the whole post – it’s a very good case-based analysis of ediscovery ethics.

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