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Enron Mail |
Bob: California law would permits a party to litigation to make a
motion asking the court to shift the cost of restoring the tapes, if unduly burdensome, to a party requesting the information. Greyhound Corporation v. Superior Court (1961), 56 Cal.2d 355, 379. In Greyhound, the California Supreme Court held, where a valid objection "to disclosure is that it entails an undue burden on the other party, the trial court should give consideration to various alternatives provided in the statute. Requiring such party to pay the costs of disclosure is not the only such method." The balancing factors suggested by the Greyhound court include the purpose of the information sought, the effect that disclosure would have on the parties and the trial, the nature of the objections urged, the hardship of production, the relative ability of the parties to retrieve the information sought, and the court's authority to make another order using another form of disclosure or denying the requests completely. Despite this case, I suspect we will have a difficult convincing a California Superior Court that the state's AG should pay Enron's cost of editing information from its backup tapes, especially if the AG can concoct an argument that he needs them because Enron has not followed some document retention policy or protocol. -----Original Message----- From: Robert.C.Williams@enron.com [mailto:Robert.C.Williams@enron.com] Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 7:47 PM To: MMolland@brobeck.com; Richard.B.Sanders@enron.com; sbishop@gibbs-bruns.com; mlk@pkns.com; mtuohey@velaw.com Cc: GFergus@brobeck.com; ADSmith@brobeck.com; PMeringolo@brobeck.com; Jan.Cooley@enron.com Subject: RE: Status report regarding subpenas Michael, call me on Monday. I want to contact any Enron employees before they get a call. With respect to Enron Wind, I need to determine if we still have a majority shareholder in that company. Jan can get you a list of Enron lawyers. Looks like we are heading for a standoff with the AG. On the directive, Andy has submitted our draft memo to Mark Haedicke for his approval. Please have someone research whether we would have to pay the cost of restoring the tapes to usable form for the AG. Thanks. -----Original Message----- From: "Molland, Michael E." <MMolland@brobeck.com<@ENRON [mailto:IMCEANOTES-+22Molland+2C+20Michael+20E+2E+22+20+3CMMolland+40brobeck +2Ecom+3E+40ENRON@ENRON.com] Sent: Friday, June 29, 2001 9:22 PM To: Williams, Robert C.; Sanders, Richard B.; 'sbishop@gibbs-bruns.com'; 'mlk@pkns.com'; 'mtuohey@velaw.com' Cc: Fergus, Gary S.; Smith, Amanda D.; Meringolo, Peter Subject: Status report regarding subpenas This summarizes the status of our work in response to the subpoenas served on Enron Corp by Dunn's committee and on EES by the AG. Today's meeting with Dave Parquet: Amanda Smith and I met with Dave Parquet at the Enron Corp offices in San Francisco late this afternoon and then talked with him this evening. He generally described the documents in the office. He describes most as confidential or proprietary. He will assemble the team leaders in the office and meet with Amanda and me and two other associates Monday morning. We should be able to complete a snapshot of the documents in the office by mid Tuesday. Our discussions raised the following issues: . Dave said Enron has a small generating subsidiary located near Palm Springs, Enron Wind Energy. It generates and sells power to utilities. The Enron subpoena asks for generation data. We will contact them Monday by phone. .EES has a small office in Long Beach. Amanda will talk to their employees Monday. . A Master Limited Partnership, EOTT Energy, also has an office in Long Beach. They may be a subsidiary of Enron Corp. Please let us know if we should contact him. . Many documents in San Francisco are covered by confidentiality agreements with Enron's clients. Dave said the confidentiality of these documents are not clear on their face and we should involve an Enron attorney in Portland -he suggested Karen Jones- to work on this issue with us. Document Retention: David said he is concerned that there is no clear corporate guideline for e-mail retention in his office. We should send him and the directors in that office (as well as all EES directors) a clear directive as soon as possible. For the time being he is following oral instructions not to delete e-mail or other documents. Earlier, Amanda talked the EES IT manager, who said that it is not possible to automatically save e-mail from most EES personnel in California (those who are on the legacy e-mail system). Until we solve this problem I suggest we retain the daily back-up tapes made for the legacy system (just as we are doing for our Portland office). Telephone call with AG's office regarding the EES subpoena: This afternoon I talked to Hirem Pattel, a deputy AG who is temporarily in charge of the EES investigation. I told him we would produce some documents without waiving our objections, but needed to discuss any production with him beforehand. I repeated Bob's offer to meet next Friday. He said they would not meet with us until we again responded to the subpoena and said in writing we would produce documents. I told him we had no obligation to do that and wanted to meet with them first. He then said he would have his supervisor call me early next week. Directives to California officers: All the EES and Enron people we have talked with in the past two weeks have been cooperative. Given the time crunch, however, it would be helpful if an Enron lawyer could contact California officers and ask them to make special efforts to help us with the document review. The people to contact are Messrs. Reilly, Parquet;McDonald, Mara,Wright, van Ulden, and the head of the Enron Wind Energy Office. Review of EES documents at San Ramon: Amanda Smith spent the morning today there and gathered documents underlying the UC litigation. Lockyer knows this litigation and will probably use our positions in it to gauge our compliance with any production agreement. We will complete an assessment of these documents early next week. We also found and took custody of the backup tape made in San Ramon May 25. Apparently no similar tape exists for Costa Mesa. We will identify and obtain earliest back-up tape that exists at that office. As we review documents for privilege we should know the identity of all Enron lawyers. Bob, could someone in your office act as a contact person to supply us with this and similar information? ======================================================= This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. To reply to our email administrator directly, send an email to postmaster@brobeck.com BROBECK PHLEGER & HARRISON LLP http://www.brobeck.com ======================================================= This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. To reply to our email administrator directly, send an email to postmaster@brobeck.com BROBECK PHLEGER & HARRISON LLP http://www.brobeck.com
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