[rayiner]

The enforcement mechanism is mostly paranoia. The ethical codes for attorneys requires you to rat out your colleagues at the threat of getting in trouble yourself if you fail to do so. Documents are managed in review databases with time stamps and user tracking. Opposing counsel will go through your productions and might spot inconsistencies. Opposing counsel will also spend hours grilling witnesses, looking for inconsistencies and references to documents that haven't been produced. Opposing counsel also generally has a good idea of what kind of documents should exist, given that corporate transactions are generally pretty stylized.

At the most basic level, the system is built on trusting lawyers to act dutifully as officers of the court. Corporate law firms care very much about their brand for trustworthiness, because at the end of the day their business depends on that brand. Nobody wants to be like Arthur Andersen, which went from a $9 billion company to nothing because people stopped trusting their brand (for the actions of a relatively small group of partners).

[michaelt]

Team Best Buy seems pretty unethical, and when Best Buy's lawyers manually check which CEO e-mails were relevant to the case I'm sure honest mistakes sometimes get made. It would be awfully easy for dishonest 'mistakes' to be made with one or two of the most incriminating e-mails.

Are you really saying there's no independent auditing? That the entire system relies on Best Buy's lawyers incriminating their co-workers and the employer who puts bread on their table? That seems exceptionally trusting in lawyers' professional ethics.

Does the discovery at least have to be done by an different law firm to the corporation's day-to-day legal work?

[rayiner]

This sort of thing is almost always handled by an outside law firm, similar to how audits are handled by an outside accounting firm.

Remember also that plaintiff's counsel also thoroughly interviews witnesses under oath. Cross-checking witness accounts can highlight inconsistency in the documentary record. It also adds a second group of people who don't want to hide information under threat of punishment.