Notable Articles in E-Discovery 3/27/13

Are Documents Containing Agreed-Upon Keywords Responsive Per Se? (Craig Ball, Ball in Your Court)

"When requesting parties hammer out agreements on search terms to be run against the producing party’s ESI, sometimes the requesting party’s expectation is that any item responsive to the agreed-upon keywords (that is, any item that’s “hit”) must be produced unless withheld as privileged.  Put another way, the requesting party believes that, by agreeing to the use of a set of keywords as a proxy for attorney review of the entire potentially-responsive collection, and thereby relieving the producing party of the broader obligation to look at everything that may be responsive, those keywords define responsiveness per se, requiring production if not privileged."

Law firm’s big markup of contract review fees sparks client attack, US court scrutiny (Robert hilson, ACEDS)

"Class action reformer Ted Frank has accused the plaintiffs firm Kirby McInerney of billing out temporary contract attorneys at more than 20 times the market rate. Frank, a legal activist and frequent critic of legal fees, has charged the firm with disguising these lawyers who were hired to perform low-level document review as highly skilled law firm associates."

Outlook Emails Can Take Many Forms – eDiscovery Best Practices (Doug Austin, EDiscovery Daily Blog)

"Most discovery requests include a request for emails of parties involved in the case.  Email data is often the best resource for establishing a timeline of communications in the case and Microsoft® Outlook is the most common email program used in business today.  Outlook emails can be stored in several different forms, so it’s important to be able to account for each file format when collecting emails that may be responsive to the discovery request."

Eight Tips to Quash the Cost of E-Discovery (Craig Ball, Ball in Your Court)

"The Luddite lawyer who knows nothing of modern methods misleads the court and cheats the client.  The adept associate proves that e-discovery is fast and affordable when the right tools and talents are brought to bear.  Electronically stored information (ESI) serves us in all our day-to-day endeavors.  ESI can and should serve us just as well in our search for probative evidence and in the resolution of disputes."

When Big Data Meets Legal Discovery (Jeff Bertolucci, Information Week)

"But once an enterprise stockpiles what could amount to tens -- or even hundreds -- of millions of relevant pieces of information, how can it sift through the data quickly? After all, efficiency is essential during electronic discovery (e-discovery), the step in civil litigation where opposing parties exchange electronically stored information...

KCura is currently managing about 27,000 active cases, and its software has roughly 73,000 users. In total, the company's software is managing close to 18 billion files, according to Sieja. "Probably a lot of the really messed-up stuff happening in the world right now, from a litigation standpoint, is being managed in our software," Sieja added.

KCura and its competitors use a machine-learning technology called predictive coding, which uses limited human input to enable a computer to "predict" how documents should be classified, according to attorney Matthew Nelson's Predictive Coding for Dummies book."