In the lead-up to AMD's anti-trust case against Intel, the two firms are at it hammer and tongs, according to this news report.

Lawyers tell me much of this case might well come down to emails relevant to the lawsuit that, well wouldn't you know, are missing.

This case has enormous lessons for companies' email storage policies, says ZDNet blogger Robin Harris.

The problem for Intel, says Harris, is that the judge can instruct the jury to assume the missing emails showed wrongdoing, which would cost Intel billions of dollars.

Harris also draws parallels with the case of the missing emails connected to the firing of Federal prosecutors last year. What happened there was that many people within the White House had been exchanging emails on a Republican National Committee account using private laptop computers provided by the party for nearly two dozen employees of the president. The White House has argued that the idea was to keep political business off of government computers. Trouble is the record of some public business may have gone missing. Funny that!

And in another case, Oracle is asking asked a US court to make German company SAP AG preserve evidence on its computers. All in the name of preserving evidence at the heart of a corporate theft lawsuit. More in this news report.

As Harris says, email protection is taking on grave political, legal and social implications. And it puts a whole new slant on the meaning of accountability. He raises some important questions: Do you know what, if any, litigation hold policy your company has? Are you ready to implement a litigation hold if company legal counsel requests it? Do you know the records management professionals in your company? Do you know what they do?

Many executives would struggle for answers.

As Ted Frank, the president of governance, risk and compliance management solutions provider Axentis told me in this interview, companies have trouble with this because they operate in a different way and they cannot see compliance as a value proposition.

"The problem is that most organisations are reactive. They wait until there's a crisis or a particular problem before they move and invest in fixing the problem. So you have got a reactive market, you've got fragmentation of compliance and risk management IT governance and when people who are managing IT governance try to get approval to do things proactively, what seems to happen is that they fail to make a good business case. Articulating the value proposition and the reason for making a proactive investment is key. So many companies seem to have trouble with that."