Could not understanding EDD issues — both evidence rules & technology — amount to malpractice? Oh, yeah, I think so, especially if the client didn’t ‘know’ not to monkey with hard drives:
"During discovery in a securities case in the Northern District of Florida, Miami attorney Michael Kreitzer‘s client wanted to see e-mails between two of the defendants. The defendants claimed that the hard drives on which the e-mails were stored had failed, and that all the data were lost.
"Kreitzer, the chair of the litigation group at Bilzin Sumberg Baena Price & Axelrod in Miami, persuaded the judge to order the defendants to produce the hard drives, and had them forensically examined.
"That examination found that the defendants had attempted to overwrite the hard drive five times to wipe out the data. Kreitzer asked the judge to instruct the jurors that they could presume that the information formerly stored on the hard drive was adverse to the defendants. The judge granted his request. The case ended in a confidential settlement."
BTW, this article describes how to destroy data on your own hard disk by overwriting it.