Michael Collins esq, aka Jimbo Collins

[Paladin]

Hey Jim
I've been thinking a bunch about you lately...and it seems the Feds are going to be asking a lot of questions about Documents that don't exist....or at least according to you....
You of course are going to blame Bob Zech and his crew...you know Anderson, Tate, LaPlante, Carrado and all the other slim balls at Airborne...you might even blame the guys at Riddle Williams in Seattle...the little branch of the big Dallas firm that you are such good friends with. Anyway what I see is all those guys and gals teaming up and blaming you to save their asses...now that puts you in a tricky spot huh??? Do you know how many IC's there are around the country that would love to see you lose your license???? I think you should give old Jon Olin a call and tell him you resign from the account and then give Tom C at the FBI a call and tell him you want to be the first one to FLIP as long as you get to keep your license.
I figger you have about 2 weeks to pull off this "save your ass" miracle.
Good luck buddy


9-15-2005
Caught you peepin' at this post...who the fuck are you guys???
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[Paladin]

Hey Jimbo....found an interesting article about some other crooked/stupid/incompetent/sleazy attorneys. This article fits you perfectly. All you have to do is just change some names...you know like substitute Steve Brown, or Assured Transportation, or Can Am, Dave Gorman, or dozens of other IC's that have sued Airborne/DHL. Shit, this doesn't even count the 20 new suits you've just been served with. Now I guess you really will try to blame Bob Zech now, maybe even LaPlante, Bacon, Carrado and all the other lying weasels at Airborne. Now in case this post pisses you off and you think you'd like to sue me to shut me up, I'd like to remind you of a couple facts. Arbitration is favored by the Federal Government...that means people like you that cheat the system are of Public Interest and case law, mine, has already ruled that the Internet is a Public Forum and therefore California Law still allows me to use a Motion to Strike against you if you were so stupid to sue me. Shit I wish you would, the first documents I would subpoena would be what Frank gave the Arbitrators to prove you were a sleaze ball. Either way I really don't give a shit what you do or think.
Here's the article BuckWheat





Morgan Stanley Hit With Class Action Alleging Discovery Improprieties

Dan Lynch
Daily Business Review
05-06-2005


A new class action lawsuit in Florida alleges that Morgan Stanley committed violations of discovery rules in as many as 1,000 securities arbitration cases across the country. Coral Springs, Fla., lawyer Darren C. Blum filed the suit on behalf of Miami firefighter Robert Quintana, his wife, Alina, and other Morgan Stanley clients said to be in their situation.

Last June, the Quintanas received a $400 award in an NASD arbitration proceeding against the New York City-based financial services giant.

In every NASD and New York Stock Exchange arbitration, both sides sign a stipulation that they have provided all relevant data and communications for the resolution of the dispute.

Todd A. Zuckerbrod, of counsel at Greenberg Traurig in West Palm Beach, Fla., has defended Morgan Stanley in a number of cases involving South Florida plaintiffs represented by Blum, including the Quintanas.

In an April 21 letter to the plaintiffs, he wrote that "there are additional sources that might contain additional responsive e-mail. These additional sources, however, are not actively used for information retrieval and are not readily searchable. It will take an as-yet unknown period of time to determine if there is e-mail or other electronic data from those sources that is responsive to discovery obligations."

In an interview, Blum said that means the Quintanas did not receive a fair arbitration hearing at the NASD, formerly known as the National Association of Securities Dealers, because they didn't have access to all relevant information. The lawsuit in Miami-Dade County Circuit Court seeks a new hearing and return of the Quintanas' filing fees and those of what Blum estimates would be another 1,000 similarly situated plaintiffs. Blum estimates that the average filing fee for members of the class is $1,500.

Zuckerbrod did not return a call for comment Thursday. A Morgan Stanley spokeswoman said it's unclear whether the data sources mentioned in Zuckerbrod's letter "will have any additional e-mails relevant to any particular matter." She said she had not yet seen the complaint.

In March, Morgan Stanley was hit with a tough sanction for discovery violations in the $2.7 billion civil fraud suit in Palm Beach County Circuit Court brought by New York financier Ronald O. Perelman.

Circuit Judge Elizabeth T. Maass ruled that the financial services firm had violated discovery orders and issued a partial summary judgment in Perelman's favor. That leaves the jury to decide only the extent to which Perelman had been damaged in a business deal with Morgan Stanley. The trial has yet to reach a conclusion.


PS I guess I should get the name of the attorney and have him file a Class Action on behalf of all the IC's that were ripped off. I wonder if Rupp or Romney have thought about this type of angle???? Shit maybe my attorney will do it.

PPS Yo Jimbo...I just thought of something else...I guess this all means that Assured and Romney will get another shot at skinning your ass. I think Mark will be able to get attorneys fees this time. You were pretty fucking lucky last time. I'd really like to know how much you paid those 3 stupid arbitrators to fuck up something as simple as who is the "prevailing party".

[Paladin]

Hey Jim.......you should be up to about $4,ooo,ooo in fees by now. Unless of course you get a bonus for lying about documents. I'm sure you are going to blame all the ex Airborne pukes for not producing documents, but you and I both know you directed the illegal activities. Well your day will come partner. (that's Texas big hat talk bud). Do you really think Betsy Tate Bacon will take your fall???? I don't think that lying bitch is that stupid, do you???

Anyway Jimbo, you should read up on the following decisions.....
You're welcome buddy.

===========================================

Zubulake v. UBS Warburg


During 2003 and 2004, United States District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin issued five groundbreaking opinions in the case of Zubulake v UBS Warburg. Zubulake is generally considered the first definitive case in the United States on a wide range of electronic discovery issues. These issues include:

The scope of a party's duty to preserve electronic evidence during the course of litigation;
Lawyer's duty to monitor their clients' compliance with electronic data preservation and production;
Data sampling;
The ability for the disclosing party to shift the costs of restoring “inaccessible” back up tapes to the requesting party;
The imposition of sanctions for the spoliation (or destruction) of electronic evidence.
The Zubulake decisions are of particular interest in the United States in light of Judge Scheindlin’s knowledge of the subject and due to the opinions arising from the influential Southern District of New York, both of which have provided American lawyers with new best practices relating to both the legal and technical aspects of electronic discovery.

Links to the five opinions are as follows:

ZUBULAKE I, MAY 13, 2003: Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 217 F.R.D. 309 (S.D.N.Y. 2003).
ZUBULAKE II (Please note: this does not relate to electronic disclosure): Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, No. 02 Civ. 1243, 2003 WL 21087136 (S.D.N.Y. May 13, 2003).
ZUBULAKE III, JULY 24, 2003: Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 216 F.R.D. 280 (S.D.N.Y. 2003).
ZUBULAKE IV, OCTOBER 22, 2003: Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 220 F.R.D. 212 (S.D.N.Y. 2003).
ZUBULAKE V: Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 2004 WL 1620866 (S.D.N.Y. July 20, 2004).

ZUBULAKE I, II, III
Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 217 F.R.D. 309 (S.D.N.Y. 2003). In a gender discrimination suit against her former employer, the plaintiff requested that the defendant produce "[a]ll documents concerning any communication by or between UBS employees concerning the plaintiff." The defendant produced 350 pages of documents, including approximately 100 pages of email. The plaintiff knew that additional responsive email existed that the defendant had failed to produce because she, in fact, had produced approximately 450 pages of email correspondence. She requested that the defendants produce the email from archival media. Claiming undue burden and expense, the defendant urged the court to shift the cost of production to the plaintiff, citing the Rowe decision. Stating that a court should consider cost-shifting only when electronic data is relatively inaccessible (such as in this case), the court considered the Rowe 8-factor cost shifting test. The court noted that the application of the Rowe factors may result in disproportionate cost shifting away from large defendants, and the court modified the test to 7 factors: (1) the extent to which the request is specifically tailored to discover relevant information; (2) the availability of such information from other sources; (3) the total cost of production compared to the amount in controversy; (4) the total cost of production compared to the resources available to each party; (5) the relative ability of each party to control costs and its incentive to do so; (6) the importance of the issue at stake in the litigation and; (7) the relative benefits to the parties of obtaining the information. The court ordered the defendant to produce, at its own expense, all responsive email existing on its optical disks, active servers, and five backup tapes as selected by the plaintiff. The court determined that only after the contents of the backup tapes are reviewed and the defendant's costs are quantified, the court will conduct the appropriate cost-shifting analysis. See also Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 216 F.R.D. 280 (S.D.N.Y. 2003).

ZUBULAKE IV
Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 220 F.R.D. 212 (S.D.N.Y. 2003). In the restoration effort that occurred according to previous e-discovery decisions in the matter, the parties discovered that certain backup tapes were missing and that emails had been deleted. The plaintiff moved for evidentiary and monetary sanctions against the defendant for its failure to preserve the missing tapes and emails. The court found that the defendant had a duty to preserve the missing evidence, since it should have known that the emails may be relevant to future litigation. Although the plaintiff did not file her charges until August 2001, by April of that year, "almost everyone associated with Zubulake recognized the possibility that she might sue," the court wrote. The court also found that the defendant failed to comply with its own retention policy, which would have preserved the missing evidence. The judge found that although the defendant had a duty to preserve all of the backup tapes at issue, and destroyed them with the requisite culpability, the plaintiff could not demonstrate that the lost evidence would have supported her claims. Therefore, it was inappropriate to give an adverse inference instruction to the jury. Even though an adverse inference instruction was not warranted, the court ordered the defendant to bear the plaintiff's costs for re-deposing certain witnesses for the limited purpose of inquiring into the destruction of electronic evidence and any newly discovered emails.

ZUBULAKE V
Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 2004 WL 1620866 (S.D.N.Y. July 20, 2004). During an ongoing discovery dispute in an employment discrimination case, the employee moved for sanctions against the employer for failing to produce backup tapes containing relevant emails and for failing to produce other relevant documents in a timely manner. See Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, 220 F.R.D. 212 (S.D.N.Y. 2003). In this latest motion, the employee contended that the employer, who recovered some of the deleted relevant emails, prejudiced her case by producing recovered emails long after the initial document requests. Furthermore, some of the emails were never produced, including an email that pertained to a relevant conversation about the employee. As such, the employee requested sanctions in the form of an adverse inference jury instruction. Determining that the employer had wilfully deleted relevant emails despite contrary court orders, the court granted the motion for sanctions and also ordered the employer to pay costs. The court further noted that defense counsel was partly to blame for the document destruction because it had failed in its duty to locate relevant information, to preserve that information, and to timely produce that information. In addressing the role of counsel in litigation generally, the court stated that "[c]ounsel must take affirmative steps to monitor compliance so that all sources of discoverable information are identified and searched." Specifically, the court concluded that attorneys are obligated to ensure all relevant documents are discovered, retained, and produced. Additionally, the court declared that litigators must guarantee that identified relevant documents are preserved by placing a "litigation hold" on the documents, communicating the need to preserve them, and arranging for safeguarding of relevant archival media.

[Paladin]

Hey Jim

Do you have enough money to retire???


I sure want to see your license yanked buddy....right along with Bob Zech and Dave Anderson.....man would three weasels licenses's sure makes good "scalps" for my trophy room.

[Paladin]

Hey Collins

You feelin' a little "gay"????

Your ass hole hurt a little????

You're fucked.

[Paladin]

Hey Jim
You are really a slime attorney
You said you needed more time because you would be out of the country??
You lying piece of shit
Minnesota is still part of the USA you idiot
Why didn't you just tell the arbitrators you going to flick your "forked tongue" on the Gorman case.
I sure hope Dave decides to pull his head out of his ass and have Tony and Lisa help.
You look real good bent over cowboy.
Maybe you could bring back that lying bitch Betsy Tate Bacon.
Actually I'd like you to bring back "your" expert.

Lastly buddy, I'm going to tell Klaus Bullwinkle to sue you for Malpractice.

You will cost them (DP) billions before this is all over. Just think if you would have told them the truth and showed them all the documents you had and were hiding. This whole mess could have settled last year for about $25 Million. Now we are talking about $5 Billion and DP becoming the laughing stock of the world.
Yep, I think you need to be sued big time.

[Paladin]

Hey Jim
Long time not talk. I just wanted you see what we are going to shove up your ass when you get into Federal Court. Your life of crime is coming to an end Buckwheat.

If corporate America hasn't heard the alarm bells ring by now, the recent $1.45 billion fraud verdict against Morgan Stanley should surely do the trick.

The Wall Street giant was slammed with the whopping judgment mainly because it repeatedly failed to produce e-documents in a timely fashion, primarily e-mails stored on backup tapes, in response to routine discovery requests.

Morgan Stanley's botched discovery efforts so exasperated the Florida trial court judge overseeing the case, Elizabeth Maass, that she took the unusual step of imposing a partial default judgment as punishment, dealing a crippling blow to the company's defense.

At the beginning of trial, Maass told the jury to assume that Morgan Stanley helped defraud the plaintiff, well-known financier and corporate raider Ronald Perelman. Perelman had claimed that Morgan Stanley conspired with one of its clients, Sunbeam Corp., to misstate the value of its assets and stock when Perelman sold one of his companies to Sunbeam in exchange for its stock. As a result, at trial Perelman only had to prove that he relied on those fraudulent actions and suffered financial harm as a result.

While the punishment against Morgan Stanley for its discovery errors may have been extreme, the company is certainly not alone in its struggles to locate stored e-mail and other electronic documents. It's a problem that bedevils other companies as well. Managing the flow of burgeoning electronic documents - stored on PCs, PDAs, laptop computers and backup tapes - through an effective document retention policy has been a "best practices" discussion point for a number of years.

But actually following through can be a daunting task, because companies often resist making documents retention a core business objective, due in part to complacency and in part to concerns over the costs involved.

Despite this, management attorneys must impress upon their clients that effectively managing electronic documents is a business imperative - if for no other reason that courts expect companies to do so.

"The Morgan Stanley case is not surprising," said B. Jay Yelton III of Miller Canfield in Detroit. "It's another in a line of cases from the past few years where courts have been less tolerant of things slipping through the cracks. The judge had pretty much had it with Morgan Stanley. She said, 'you don't know where the documents are and you can't figure out how to find them. You're not taking this seriously.' Courts are telling companies to get organized."

A "warning shot" like the Morgan Stanley verdict will hopefully get companies to pay attention and "buy in" to effective e-records management, Yelton said.

Morgan Stanley's effort to portray its discovery delays as inadvertent fell flat with the trial judge.

"It didn't much matter whether it was inadvertent or on purpose," said John R. Bielema, who practices at Powell Goldstein in Atlanta. The judge "had a belief it was on purpose because it was so badly botched, so badly coordinated, so badly delayed. She presumed it was in bad faith."




Discovery Duties


A 2004 decision from a U.S. District Court in New York is widely cited as the leading case on the duties of parties and their attorneys in preserving e-documents.(Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, LLC, No. 02-1234 (S.D.N.Y. July 20, 2004).)

In that case, which concerned an employment discrimination claim, both the defendant's in-house and outside counsel had periodically instructed its employees to retain relevant information. Nonetheless, employees deleted some relevant e-mails and the defendant withheld others from its attorneys.

The trial judge found that the attorneys had failed to give a key employee a "litigation hold" instruction - a directive that stops, once litigation is commenced, the routine destruction of documents as part of a company's retention policy. The judge also found that attorneys failed to communicate effectively with another employee about the maintenance of her computer files, and failed to protect against the destruction of backup tapes that could have stored deleted e-mails.

Both inside and outside counsel must make "reasonable" efforts to locate, preserve and produce relevant documents, the judge held. Simply reminding employees generally about a "litigation hold" and listing relevant data is insufficient.

Because of these shortcomings, the judge instructed jurors to presume that the withheld information was prejudicial to the defendant. Eventually, the jury awarded the plaintiff $9 million damages and $20 million in punitive damages. (See "Wall Street Firm Hit With $29 Million Discrimination Award," Lawyers Weekly USA, May 9, 2005. Search words for LWUSA Archives: Zubulake and Hubbard.)

The case illustrates the lengths to which attorneys must go to ensure discovery compliance.

"People will ignore an e-mail about a litigation hold," Bielema said. "A lot of follow- up and prodding is needed."

He suggested that if a company is big enough to have inside counsel, they be the ones to "lead the charge, because outside counsel doesn't have a relationship with inside employees."

Kathleen C. Stone of Looney, Cohen, Reagan & Aisenberg in Boston agreed.

"You don't want outside counsel to do this alone and make it seem like they're this 1,000 pound gorilla from the outside. You should make it a joint effort, because in-house counsel can couch it in terms that the business people can understand," she said.

In the Morgan Stanley case, noted Geoffrey Millsom of Adler Pollock & Sheehan in Providence, R.I., "miscommunications" between trial counsel and company employees was readily apparent.

"It didn't appear that everyone knowledgeable about the records communicated effectively with the attorneys," he said. "This points out the importance of having a comprehensive meeting at the beginning of major litigation. Companies need to empower as many people with knowledge to help the lawyers to get their arms around the universe of responsive documents. You need to cast the net wide enough to bring into the litigation team anyone who can put their hands on the information."

If this doesn't happen, attorneys could find themselves being sued for malpractice, as Morgan Stanley has threatened to sue Kirkland & Ellis, which represented it in the Perelman case.




Centralizing Records


The importance of centralizing records management as much as possible is a key lesson from the Morgan Stanley case.

"Morgan Stanley fell short because records were stored all over the company," said Millsom. "There was a lack of a centralized repository for storage of backup tapes."

The benefit of a centralized system is that records can usually be found and accessed fairly readily, and it's less likely that documents are being stored and retained in an inconsistent manner.

"If you have a designated person as the contact, you don't have to go on a fishing expedition and ask every person at every cubicle what they know," said Bielema.

An added benefit is that it's easier to assess who needs to be involved from the get-go, a crucial first step that can avoid problems down the road as companies head deeper into litigation.

But preserving records and then being able to track them down during litigation requires diligence and planning, according to Yelton.

"When a lawsuit is filed or an outside investigation is likely," he suggested, "a team that includes counsel, IT people and key internal employees involved in the underlying allegations must be established. Then come up with a plan. Don't wait until discovery requests are served."

And once a company starts locating and retrieving e-documents, they have to be organized in logical manner.

"One of the goals is to realize what is missing," Yelton said. "It helps you identify the gaps."

But even in the absence of major litigation or government investigations, records management must be an ongoing process, according to Yelton.

"Companies should be destroying what they don't need, organizing what they do need, and getting to know what is retained," he said. "You have to have an organized structure at the front end and have it in a format that makes sense. You're in immediate trouble if you go into litigation without a plan in place. If you don't know what you have and where to find it, how can you stop someone from unintentionally deleting it?"

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are expected to be amended within the next year to broadly more encompass e-documents.

The expected amendments "will place e-discovery front and center in the overall discovery process," said Stone. "Counsel will need to come up with a plan for discovery of e-documents such that it will become an expected part of discovery in every case. It will become routine. But it will also mean years of litigation as courts establish guidelines on what's 'reasonable' in preserving e-records."



State Of Technology


As discovery of electronic records becomes more commonplace, litigators will have to expand their skill set to include an understanding, even if rudimentary, of information technology.

This means "having a clear understanding of how technology is set up - who the knowledgeable people are at companies, how to locate all potentially relevant information and how to access it," said Bielema.

Software packages that help companies make sure employees are storing e-mails logically, consistently and for specified periods of time are becoming more readily available, according to IT specialist Mark Oudersluys, who works for Michigan-based Miller Canfield.

"Having the software in place will help companies assess what has been retained and as well as locate it," said Oudersluys, who helps clients of Miller Canfield develop and maintain records retention programs.

For example, e-folders can be established to retain e-mails consistent with a company's documents retention policy, he noted. And employees can receive periodic signals to either store an e-mail or delete it. If they fail to follow the policy, their e-mail accounts can be shut down.

The system can be set up so that "everything can be filed consistently, and at the end of a pre-arranged time period, the content is automatically deleted," he explained. "The automatic deletion feature is synchronized on the company's main server, as well as individual desk top computers, laptops and PDAs. The software can take into account individuality in storing e-mails, but individual use is tied into a master retention policy."

A litigation hold feature can automatically cancel the destruction time frame to avoid inadvertent deletion of potential evidence, Ourdersluys said.

Online archiving also allows for searches by word, which compares favorably with backup tapes, which generally have to be reproduced on paper and pored over page by page - often a time consuming, expensive task.

An effective documents retention policy also streamlines what is retained electronically, said Steven Lilley of iLumin Software Services, Inc. in Reston, Va.

"You can create a 'smart' archiving system [that uses] the rules of a particular business and is consistent with what regulators are requiring," he said. "It reviews e-mail for content based on concepts, rather than just reviewing the mail generally. Not necessarily every piece of evidence is retained."

This is helpful for or lawyers preparing for litigation, because "if you have an archive in place you [can] spend less time worrying about the proper collection of the data and more time reviewing for responsive data," Lilley said.

Because of these advantages, the use of back up tapes will eventually decline, predicts IT specialist John Osborn, who works with Ourdersluys.

"It's not a very good medium. Over time, it decays. And it's not nearly as fast as CDs or DVDs," Osborn said.

But some companies continue using backup tapes because they fear that online archiving will create more discoverable data, according to Lilley.

And, noted Ourdersluys, in the end, the storage medium used is less important than an effective records management program, which means having a policy that's clearly defined and consistently enforced.