Notable Articles in E-Discovery 4/10/13
/Six Big E-Discovery Blunders (William Hamilton, Law Technology News)
"...the small and medium case is really where the e-discovery rubber meets the road. Ninety-seven percent of cases are in state courts, they said — and these are the cases that require the best e-discovery skills, because the cases have limited resources, modest amounts at issue, and yet generate tons of electronically stored information. Even if you collect just two gigabytes of data per custodian, that's two pickup trucks of printed paper for each custodian — 60 boxes that would take an attorney two months to manually review. And modest cases involving five to 10 custodians generate the equivalent of many hundreds of bankers boxes of paper, the panelists asserted."
Can You Be A Competent Attorney Without Keeping Pace With Relevant Technology? (Christine Soares, Defending Atticus)
"Late last year, the ABA formally amended the Model Rules to require that lawyers keep pace with “relevant technology” in order to represent clients competently. The new comment to Model Rule 1.1 states:
To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice,including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology, engage in continuing study and education and comply with all continuing legal education requirements to which the lawyer is subject.
Although the Model Rules are not designed to be a basis for civil liability, plaintiffs can easily draw from them to create a case against lawyers. This amendment makes clear that failing to stay abreast of technology can place you and your firm at risk."
Don't Forget About E-Discovery When Moving To The Cloud (Jay Yurkiw, Technology Law Source)
"As businesses move more applications and data to cloud services (e.g., Google Apps for Business, Salesforce.com, Amazon S3, etc.), they inevitably are going to find themselves in litigation with the need to retrieve electronically stored information (ESI) from the cloud to comply with their e-discovery obligations. While the risks of e-discovery likely will not keep any businesses away frompublic cloud services altogether, businesses at least should plan for how they are going to meet the demands of e-discovery in the cloud when litigation arises."
Is it Time to Ditch the Per Hour Model for Document Review? – eDiscovery Trends (Doug Austin, eDiscovery Daily)
"Why don’t more firms offer a per document rate for document review? Or, perhaps a better question would be why don’t more organizations insist on a per document rate? That seems like a better way to make document review costs more predictable and more consistent. I’m not sure why, other than “that’s the way we’ve always done it”, that it hasn’t become more predominant. Knowing the per document rate and the number of documents to be reviewed up front would seem to eliminate overbilling disputes for document review, at least."