Recently, I assisted a large corporate client where there were several searches conducted across the company’s enterprise-wide document management systems (DMS) for ESI potentially responsive to the litigation. Some of the individual searches on these systems retrieved over 200,000 files by themselves! Here is how we made those searches more precise.
read moreSo far in this blog series, we’ve taken a look at the ‘litigation support culture’ circa 1980, and we’ve covered how databases were built and used. We’ve come a long way since then, and in the next posts I’m going to talk a bit about how things evolved. One of the first big changes in how we worked was the use of microfilm.
read moreI frequently get asked how big does an ESI collection need to be to benefit from eDiscovery technology. In a recent case with one of my clients, the client had a fairly small collection – only about 4 GB. But, when a judge ruled that they had to start conducting depositions in a week, they needed to review that data in a weekend. But, if you’re not facing a tight deadline, how large does your collection need to be for the use of eDiscovery technology to provide benefits?
read moreSeveral months ago, I provided search strategy assistance to a client that had already agreed upon several searches with opposing counsel. One search related to mining activities, so the attorney decided to use a wildcard of “min*” to retrieve variations like “mine”, “mines” and “mining”. That one search retrieved over 300,000 files with hits. Why? Let’s see.
read moreBelieve it or not, it has been four years ago this past Saturday since we launched the eDiscovery Daily blog! Now is your chance to catch up on some posts that you may have missed!
read moreA lot of people consider Technology Assisted Review (TAR) and Predictive Coding (PC) to be new technology. We attempted to debunk that as myth last year after our third annual thought leader interview series by summarizing comments from some of the thought leaders that noted that TAR and PC really just apply artificial intelligence to the review process. But, the foundation for TAR may go way farther back than you might think.
read moreSo far in this blog series, we’ve taken a look at the ‘litigation support culture’ in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, we’ve covered how databases were built, and we started discussing how databases were used. We’re going to continue that in this post by discussing the workflow for searching and selecting documents for review.
read moreIn Mazzei v. Money Store, 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.
read moreIf you have worked in litigation support for a number of years like I have, you start to assemble a toolkit of applications that help you get your job done more quickly and efficiently. In her excellent Litigation Support Guru blog, Amy Bowser-Rollins has recently published a series of posts that describe tools of the trade that she recommends to litigation support “newbies”. Let’s take a look.
read moreIn United States v. Univ. of Neb. at Kearney, Nebraska Magistrate Judge Cheryl R. Zwart denied the government’s motion to compel discovery, finding that “ESI is neither the only nor the best and most economical discovery method for obtaining the information the government seeks” and stating that searching for ESI “should not be deemed a replacement for interrogatories, production requests, requests for admissions and depositions”.
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