eDiscovery Daily Blog
Do You Have Anything to Fear, This Year?: eDiscovery Horrors!
It’s that time of year, time for “Irish Jack” (you know, from the “O’Lantern” family) to make his annual appearance for Halloween. Every year at this time, we try to “scare” you with tales of eDiscovery (and now, cybersecurity) horrors (because, after all, we’re an eDiscovery blog). Let’s see how we do this year. Do you have anything to fear, this year?
Did you know that you can be sanctioned for failing to preserve texts for litigation? Here’s one example where it happened.
What about this?
International eDiscovery just became more difficult. A 27-year-old Austrian law graduate may have brought an end to the 15 year old “Safe Harbor” agreement enabling transatlantic data transfers between the U.S. and European Union because of – wait for it – privacy concerns.
Or this?
When a text file doesn’t appear to match its corresponding image file or its corresponding original Excel native file, what do you do? Here’s what you do.
How about this?
According to this study, two-thirds of law firms have no staff devoted to information security. Yikes!
Or maybe this?
Did you hear about the firm that designated 141,525 of 148,636 produced documents as “highly confidential”? The judge ordered them to re-review and re-designate those documents within ten days. Even assessed a $25,000 fees award against their outside counsel to compensate the defendant for its efforts in reviewing the documents.
Finally, how about this?
This court ordered a mandatory adverse inference instruction against two attorney defendants so that the trier of fact could “draw the strongest possible adverse inference from defendants’ bad faith and intentional destruction, deletion and failure to produce relevant evidence”. The court also awarded attorney fees, and forwarded a copy of the order regarding one of the defendants to the New York State Committee on Professional Standards for attorneys. Reading the case, it’s easy to understand why.
Scary, huh? If the possibility of sanctions, issues with international discovery, data breaches or being ordered to re-do your work scares you, then the folks at eDiscovery Daily will do our best to provide useful information and best practices to enable you to relax and sleep soundly, even on Halloween!
Of course, if you seriously want to get into the spirit of Halloween, click here. This will really terrify you!
What do you think? Is there a particular eDiscovery issue that scares you? Please share your comments and let us know if you’d like more information on a particular topic.
Happy Halloween!
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.