I mean, all the intern did was comb through some documents in his native language. I’m sure if he weren’t there, they would’ve just hired a translator (much cheaper than lawyers). Not to disparage the work they did or anything.

The really remarkable “hero” here is the Korean junior executive who stupidly mentioned destroying evidence on the record.

Ok, imagine the following: you are a (young and probably underpaid) summer intern; you suddenly get the task to drop whatever else you were doing (which was probably more interesting) and read through megabytes of mind-numbing documents; you have little to no personal "skin in the game"; and still, you somehow manage to muster the motivation to pay enough attention so you are able to spot the one interesting email among the thousands of irrelevant ones. Does it sound more remarkable now?

It's also strange that the Korean side didn't destroy that evidence and handed it over in discovery. Most companies who destroy evidence at least try to do a decent job and go all the way. If the servers and individuals responsible were in Korea, an American civil suit would have a hard time reaching them.

Yeah no, this is such a silly take on the situation. Finding anything useful in literally millions of pages of arbitrary documents, when you don't even know if there is anything useful, is an amazing feat. "Just" hiring a translator could also be prohibitively expensive at this volume when your company is already on the verge of bankruptcy. Even running a regular text search across millions of pages of what was probably a mix of emails, word documents, pdfs, etc takes a while today, never mind in the early 2000s. Keep in mind that this was probably an intern on what was a regular computer at the time, not some fancy distributed compute cluster. Finding anything useful in that pile is a gargantuan feat, even if there was no language barrier.

It was also a needle in a haystack as they got document dumped on in discovery to exhaust their few remaining resources.