Notable Articles in E-Discovery 3/13/13

Caution: Recent Case Highlights Importance of Broad, Early Preservation Efforts (Tracey Turnbull, Technology Law Source)

"A company may discard data, documents or records in the ordinary course of its business. But routine destruction of information that may be relevant to a government investigation or a lawsuit must be suspended and information must be saved as soon as possible after a party has notice that it must preserve evidence. A recent case from the district court for the Southern District of Ohio looks at the events that triggered a bank’s duty to save particular data considered relevant by its opponent and the consequences of its failure to stop the routine purging of that data on a timely basis."

E-Discovery: Savings in the Cloud (John C. Tredennick, American Bar Association)

"In the field of e-discovery, where tackling mounds of data is the greatest challenge, technology is indispensable. Specialized applications enable legal teams to search and review volumes of data that would be beyond the practical capacity of purely human review. These applications speed the process of finding and producing relevant documents and weeding out those that are privileged.

... As a longtime trial lawyer who has been steeped in legal technology throughout my career, I am convinced that the cloud is the better option for large-scale e-discovery. Of course, every legal team must make its own independent determination about which platform is best. While a number of factors are relevant, cost is always near the top of the list. As our analysis shows, when you evaluate the total cost of ownership of cloud versus local platforms, the cloud wins, hands down."

Five Common Myths About Predictive Coding – eDiscovery Best Practices (Doug Austin, eDiscovery Daily Blog)

"During my interviews with various thought leaders (a list of which can be found here, with links to each interview), we discussed various aspects of predictive coding and some of the perceived myths that exist regarding predictive coding and what it means to the review process.  I thought it would be a good idea to recap some of those myths and how they compare to the “reality” (at least as some of us see it)."

Solving the Biggest Problems of E-Discovery (Sue Reisinger, Law Technology News)

"In the swiftly evolving field of electronic discovery, courts are moving away from harsh sanctions and toward more creative and proportional solutions to what has become a very costly problem for many companies.

That's the view of several experts at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher who took part Thursday in a webcast on e-discovery hot topics. The session was based on the law firm's lengthy publication "2012 Year-End Electronic Discovery Update: Moving Beyond Sanctions and Toward Solutions to Difficult Problems.""

Court Rules Production Must be TIFFs with Bates Numbers – eDiscovery Case Law (Doug Austin, eDiscovery Daily Blog)

"In Branhaven, LLC v. Beeftek, Inc., 2013 U.S. Dist., (D. Md. Jan. 4, 2013), Maryland Magistrate Judge Susan K. Gauvey sanctioned plaintiff’s attorneys for wrongfully certifying the completeness of their eDiscovery production and also ruled that defendants “demonstrated that without Bates stamping and .tiff format", the plaintiff's production "was not reasonably usable and therefore was insufficient under Rule 34”.

In this trademark infringement suit, the defendants alleged numerous instances of “discovery abuses intended to harass defendants, cause unnecessary delay, and needlessly increase the cost of litigation” by the plaintiff, resulting in $51,122 in legal fees and expenses related to the plaintiff’s “document dump” of 112,000 pages of electronically stored information (ESI).  The Plaintiffs produced their ESI in PDF format, which was challenged by the defendants, because the production was untimely and not in TIFF format with Bates Numbers on every page."