Notable Articles in E-Discovery 3/6/13

A Bad "Day" for a Company Whose In-House Attorney Failed to Properly Preserve Relevant Documents (Susan Nardone, E-Discovery Law Alert)

"An Arizona federal court has determined that default judgment, an adverse instruction and monetary damages are proper remedies for in-house counsel’s failure to take the proper steps to preserve potentially relevant evidence after receiving notice of potential litigation. In Day v. LSI Corporation, Docket No. CIV-11-186-TUC-CKJ, the United States District Court for the District of Arizona granted, in part, the plaintiff-employee’s motion for entry of a default judgment and imposed additional sanctions against the defendant-employer, concluding that the employer’s in-house attorney had a “culpable mind” and acted willfully in failing to carry out the company’s preservation obligations."

Five Steps to Regaining E-Discovery Control in the Era of Big Data (Scott Giordano, KM World)

"The vast majority of e-discovery-related judicial sanctions occur as a result of poor coordination among e-discovery team members and incomplete hand-offs from one application program to another. In the era of Big Data, the risks of sanctions correspond to the growing volume and nature of ESI and the speed at which it arrives in an enterprise. Enterprises can no longer risk a reactive approach to e-discovery. Taking a proactive approach through automation, workflows and the application of advanced technology holds the key for addressing Big Data challenges for all knowledge workers."

Reducing Legal Department Budgets May Be Short-Sighted (Al Driver, The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel)

"Given today’s economic climate, most companies are asking their legal departments to find ways to reduce their budgets. While this may simply be a knee-jerk reaction, general counsel need to be prepared to address the issue, such as by demonstrating that budget reductions would result in limiting the legal department’s ability to positively affect their company’s P&L, or by showing that the legal department’s expenditures are justified to avoid specific risks that would result in much greater losses than the small savings justified."

The Many Types of Legal Search Software in the CAR Market Today (Ralph Losey, E-Discovery Team)

"How many different types of Computer Assisted Review (“CAR”) software are there? How do their secret black boxsearch engines work? What are the most effective types of search software available today? I need to shed some light on these questions as a predicate for a discussion of the next stage of the predictive coding debate. As I said in New Developments in Advanced Legal Search: the emergence of the “Multimodal Single-SME” approach, the next stage of the debate is not whether to use a CAR, or how much disclosure you should make, but which CAR, and, most important of all, how to drive the CAR."