Negotiating the Minefields of Electronic Discovery

A company’s employee has sued for sexual harassment, age discrimination, or wrongful termination. Or, as another example, the company has been sued for infringement of intellectual property, breach of contract, fraud, or any number of other business reasons. During the course of discovery, the plaintiff serves discovery requests, including a request for data that has been deleted from the company’s electronic records but may still be contained within the company’s backup systems. The search for this data is time consuming and expensive. Discoverable materials may be found in the company’s backup system, but does that possibility justify the lost productivity and expense to restore the material

Limits on the star formation rates of z>2 damped Ly-alpha systems from H-alpha spectroscopy

We present the results of a long-slit K-band spectroscopic search with CGS4 on UKIRT for H-alpha emission from the objects responsible for high-redshift (z > 2) damped Ly-alpha absorption systems. The objective was to measure the star-formation rates in these systems. However, no H-alpha emission was detected above our 3-sigma limits of f < 10E-19 W/m**2, corresponding to star formation rates < 10 M_sun/yr/h**2 (q_0=0.5). These upper limits are more meaningful than those from searches for Ly-alpha emission because the H-alpha line is unaffected by resonant scattering. For q_0=0.5 our limits are in conflict with the star formation rates predicted under the assumption that the high-z DLAs are the fully-formed galactic-disk counterparts of today's massive spiral galaxies. Deeper spectroscopy is needed to test this picture for q_0=0.0. A programme of NICMOS imaging observations currently underway, combined with VLT spectroscopy, will provide a detailed picture of the link between DLAs and young galaxies.Comment: 5 pages, LaTex, includes 1 encapsulated postscript figure. To appear in the proceedings of the workshop on "NICMOS and the VLT: A New Era of High Resolution Near Infrared Imaging and Spectroscopy", held in Pula, Sardinia (26-27 May 1998), eds. Wolfram Freudling et al. Uses aspconf.sty and epsf.st