eDiscovery Daily Blog
Our Nation’s Largest City Now Has a Dedicated eDiscovery Group in its Law Department: eDiscovery Trends
If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
The New York City Law Department has created an electronic discovery group that will be dedicated to assisting the agency’s litigators with preserving and producing electronic evidence.
As reported in the New York Law Journal (NYC Law Department Creates E-Discovery Unit, by Andrew Keshner), Corporation Counsel Zachary Carter said in an internal announcement that the department had moved eDiscovery duties from the department’s Litigation Support Division into a new, separate unit “to meet the increasing demands of e-discovery”.
According to the article, Kenneth A. Becker, co-chair of the department’s Electronic Evidence Committee since 2004, will head the group and Daniel Lim will be deputy director. About 7,000 cases are filed against the city each year, according to budget testimony from Carter in March – at that time, he testified that the torts division alone was defending approximately 20,000 cases.
According to the New York City Law Department Year in Review summary for 2014, the Litigation Support department helped expand electronic discovery in almost every litigating division, including large public policy and commercial cases with millions of documents as well as counseling client agencies on electronic record retention policies and litigation readiness strategies. The department also supervised and managed completion of 600-plus agency affidavits in support of motions for summary judgment, as well as supervising and managing production of discovery responses in 2,700-plus matters. So, they are certainly a busy group! Now, a new dedicated group within the NYC Law Department will manage its eDiscovery.
So, what do you think? Will other large cities follow suit, if they haven’t already? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
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