I have run into a variety of situations where individuals and companies need to obtain logs from third parties in relation to an internal matter that is being investigated.
What are the best steps for getting a civil subpoena together and making it happen?
How much time and effort does it take to do so? What is the difficulty involved in doing so?
I have even seen cases where the customers of companies request the logs related to their customer account and the Bank, ISP, cell carrier, or Mail provider refuse to release records to the customer.
Any thoughts\experience about this issue that anyone would care to share? Any tips, suggestions, references?
We often try to engage law enforcement but some times they are too busy to take some of these cases.
I assume that you have consulted a lawyer?
Many large organizations have, in place, a document describing how to write a request for production/subpoena, who to send it to, and under what conditions the request will not vbe granted. I would start, there. Many types of businesses enjoy some kinds of legal protections against such requests while others (banks, ISP, etc.) see these so frequently that they can't possibly be expected to comply requests which lie outside a restricted set of formats.
Check with the legal section of the business web site to see if they have policies in place.
This link, which has been posted, before has some useful information…
http//cryptome.org/
You may need some time to think this out and structure it in such a way that it has a reasonable chance of being sustained by the judge. One thing to do, in the meantime, would be to send a preservation letter outlining what you hope to obtain and whatever other information will help the producing party to segregate what you hope will be produced. These are not open-ended, however, and you may be limited to something like 90 days before which the subpoena/request for production must be executed or the preserved data is destroyed.
Remember that depending upon who the producing party is, what may seem like a simple request can get very complicated and expensive if it has to be applied to thousands of requests. One of the reason that ISPs are immune from civil subpoenas related to the content of subscriber e-mails is the cost to, otherwise, comply with such requests when multiplied by the number of domestic cases in which the information might be requested.
Sean
Thanks for the reply………… and your comments are certainly what I have experienced. I was just hoping to get some other viewpoints in order to confirm what was going on.
Frankly, I am amazed at the number of times this issue comes up for clients and the difficulty there is in obtaining this data. Obviously there needs to be checks and balances but the bar (from a civil perspective IMHO) is high enough to prevent most organizations from identifying and documenting "attacks" against them unless they have lots of money.
Excuse me while I disconnect from the Internet. 😉