Hypothetical situation:
The company you work for was issued a court order demanding you turn over all the presentations that the company’s employees have given. Further, let’s say you have always done your presentations in OpenOffice.org Impress. You burn a CD-R of your 100s of presentations and include a README.txt (launched by an AUTORUN.INF) that says "Anything not opened by PowerPoint can be opened by the freely available OpenOffice.org at http://www.openoffice.org/"
Later, your in-house legal council coimes to you and says "Lawyers don’t have OpenOffice, we need to make this more user-friendly to lawyers, can you convert them to PowerPoint?" After arguing over free and easiness to obtain of OpenOffice, you give in and convert them all to PowerPoint.
Let’s take it as a given that no file format conversation is 100% accurate. Let’s also assume that the spirit of the court order is for the presentations you actually gave.
Did you tamper with evidence? The PowerPoint version is technically NOT the version you actually gave. Or is it good enough?
I don’t think you’ve "tampered" with the evidence, because the originals are still intact. But you’ve handed over copies which cannot be considered perfectly accurate. I would always seek to turn over identical copies. I don’t relish the idea of angering a judge.
I’d suggest including the OpenOffice installer on the first CD, and telling the in-house counsel that if he wants to convert it, he can do it himself.
It would really depend on what the lawyers are looking for.
If it was a legal suit that was looking for some data within presentation that could have been given by any employee at your company, then your legal team would want to be able to prove that they collected these presentation from every employee’s computer and they are exact copies of the originals.
They would then want to be able to prove that the offending data was or was not in those presentations. The hard part comes when the other side says that your company may have modified all or one of the presentations to remove the data. If you company just asks for you to copy the files to CDs, then they would not be able to prove that you didn’t modify them before submitting them as evidence. Things like MD5 hashes should also be supplied with the original files to help with this, but the only true was is to make a forensic bit image or all the systems in question and preserve them as evidence. (See: EnCase, FTK, or even DD)
This way if the other side says "Mr. Smith gave a presentation on XX/XX/XXXX that had Y in it.", you lawyers can have a 3rd party do a forensic search of Mr. Smith’s system and say, "Here is presentation Z from Mr. Smith’s computer, it was created on XX/XX/XXXX and last modified on XX/XX/XXXX. It does not have X in it".
"more user-friendly for lawyers" … *sigh*
pity the lawyers weren’t more user-friendly.
that aside, as nick says above, it depends upon what is actally sought. besides, they’ll probably only be printing them out onto paper anyway. lawyers love paper.
the lawyer didn’t ask the right questions in the first place. that’s not your fault. a carte blanche court order suggests someone hasn’t done their research/thinking proparly nad formulated a specific description of what was actually needed.
also, the lawyer is responsible to the court for ensuring that the ‘evidence’ is not ‘tampered with’. besides, i suspect the lawyer (and or their colleagues) would be spending many sleepless nights ferretting thorugh those files looking for whatever-it-was they really needed.
[having been both the custodian of data files and a lawyer undertaking ‘discovery’, i understand the issues on both sides of the game]
the more i think about this, the more i suspect someone is (a) lazy, and/or (b) has no idea what they are really looking for, they only suspect it’ll be in those files somewhere. (b) would suggest that the court order ought to have been opposed more competently/throughly (fishing is bad, bad, bad – you fight it all the way), (a) suggests a thrillkill might be in order.