Deadline looms for Intel to produce details of emails missing in AMD case

15 May 2008 | 18:00 BST

By Sylvie Barak

Law and order

INTEL HAS SUFFERED A setback in its legal battle against AMD, after being ordered to produce records of internal employee interviews on the subjects of missing emails and documents relevant to the case.

Special Master Vincent Poppiti ordered Intel to come up with documents Chipzilla tried to hide, which relate to other documents and emails it claims to have deleted.

In the ruling from May 9th, Poppiti ordered Intel to deliver the documents within five business days.

Chipzilla had claimed showing the documents would infringe lawyer-client privilege. It then offered to give the court its own summary, which came to the conclusion that Intel had done nothing wrong. Not on purpose anyway. Yes, emails had been deleted, but they were all deleted by accident. Every single one of them. Totally accidentally, and in no way or to hide any evidence or anyfink, guvnor.

AMD has accused Intel of giving bigger discounts to computer manufacturers who used only Intel chips, of punishing OEM vendors who considered buying AMD chips, and of giving away products which prevented AMD from gaining market share.

Intel imaintains the x86 microprocessor market is a competitive one, in which it simply had better products than its rival.

But when AMD started asking Intel to produce documents and emails critical to the case, Intel began to stall. Producing the documents shouldn’t have been a problem because the company was supposedly taking pains to back up all key documents, emails and memos. But - shock, horror - Intel discovered that pretty much most of its employees forgot to turn off the "auto delete" function in their inbox, meaning that any email older than 35 days old was sent straight to document heaven (or hell, depending on whose side you’re on).

Also to Intel’s sincere dismay, back-up tapes which should have had the documents stored on them were, again, accidentally recycled after only a year.

Probably figuring that this would not go down very well in court, Intel hired law firm, Weil Gotshal & Manges, to interview 1,023 employees about what they usually did with their old emails and documents.

Intel said, the "investigation has revealed no instance of deliberate deletion to deny AMD access to any information responsive to the allegations in the Complaint". Any deletions were simply "misunderstandings or errors by individual employees".

Special Master Poppiti, however, has now decided he’ll be having none of this cobblers and writes: "AMD and the Class Plaintiffs cannot in fairness be expected to blindly rely on Intel's assertions in performing their critically important role of fully informing the Court on the issue."

It will be interesting to see if Intel manages to produce the said documents with the five-day timeframe as ordered, or if, oooops, they too have suddenly and inexplicably been deleted. µ

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