eDiscovery Daily Blog
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid – eDiscovery Horrors!
Today is Halloween. Every year at this time, because (after all) we’re an eDiscovery blog, we try to “scare” you with tales of eDiscovery horrors. This is our fifth year of doing so, let’s see how we do this year. Be afraid, be very afraid!
Did you know that overlaying Bates numbers on image-only Adobe PDF files causes the text of the image not to be captured by eDiscovery processing applications?
What about this?
Finding that the information was relevant and that the defendants “acted with a culpable state of mind” when they failed to preserve the data in its original form, New York Magistrate Judge Ronald L. Ellis granted the plaintiff’s motion for spoliation sanctions against the defendant, ordering the defendant to bear the cost of obtaining all the relevant data in question from a third party as well as paying for plaintiff attorney fees in filing the motion.
Or this?
It’s Friday at 5:00 and I need 15 gigabytes of data processed to review this weekend.
How about this?
Ultimately, it became clear that the defendant had not exported or preserved the data from salesforce.com and had re-used the plaintiffs’ accounts, spoliating the only information that could have addressed the defendant’s claim that the terminations were performance related (the defendant claimed did not conduct performance reviews of its sales representatives). As a result, Judge Kemp stated that the “only realistic solution to this problem is to preclude Tellermate from using any evidence which would tend to show that the Browns were terminated for performance-related reasons”…
Or maybe this?
Could an “unconscionable” eDiscovery vendor actually charge nearly $190,000 to process 505 GB and host it for three months? Could another vendor charge over $800,000 to re-process and host data (that it had previously hosted) for approximately two months? Yes, in both cases (though, at least in the second case, the court disallowed over $700,000 of the billed costs).
Scary, huh? If the possibility of additional processing charges for your PDF files, sanctions because you didn’t preserve data in its original format or preserve it in your cloud-based system or inflated eDiscovery vendor charges 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!
Then again, if it really is Friday at 5:00 and you need 15 gigabytes of data processed to review this weekend (inexpensively, no less), maybe you should check this out.
Of course, if you seriously want to get into the spirit of Halloween, click here. This will really terrify you! (Rest in Peace, Robin)
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 Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.