Akio Toyoda, President of Toyota

Remember the days of "Oh, to be a fly on that wall?"  Well, with ediscovery you pretty much can be these days.  Toyota is finding this out the hard way.  According to a CNN Money article we may soon be privy to purported 'Books of Knowledge' kept by those who were aware of the faults of some of the carmaker's vehicles.  Dimitrios Biller, former Toyota attorney, claims that these documents were never handed over during earlier phases of discovery:

"We have reviewed these documents and found evidence that Toyota deliberately withheld relevant electronic records that it was legally required to produce in response to discovery orders in litigation," [Edolphus "Ed" Towns, D-N.Y., head of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform] wrote in a letter Friday to Toyota North America President Yoshimi Inaba. "Many of these documents concern 'rollover' cases in which the plaintiff was injured."

Among the documents, the letter said, was a memo sent by Biller in September 2005. In the memo, Biller reminded his supervisor of the need to turn over information from an internal Toyota database regarding known design flaws and countermeasures to deal with them. Such sharing of information is required by law as part of the "discovery" process in a lawsuit.

"Clearly, this information should have been produced in litigation before today." Biller wrote in the memo, as quoted in Towns' letter, "[Toyota] is clearly not producing all of the relevant information/documents in it possession." Finally, Mr. Biller concludes, "We need to start preserving, collecting and producing e-mails and electronic discovery."

Some information from this database was kept in secret "Books of Knowledge" maintained by the company, Biller asserts, according to the letter.

For the full article Oversight chief says Toyota withheld documents with a video of Japan's reaction to Toyoda's response, click here.