Our Insights on eDiscovery

Read on to learn more about the latest trends and insights in the world of digital discovery.
EDRM Announces Version 3 of the IGRM for Information Governance – eDiscovery Trends
EDRM Announces Version 3 of the IGRM for Information Governance – eDiscovery Trends 150 150 CloudNine

This week, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) Project, through its Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM) Project, announced today the release of version 3.0 of the IGRM. As their press release notes, “The updated model now includes privacy and security as primary functions and stakeholders in the effective governance of information. This release of the IGRM reflects broad industry support and collaboration across the expert communities of ARMA International and CGOC (Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council).”

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Want to be an eDiscovery PM? Roll Up Your Sleeves. – eDiscovery Trends
Want to be an eDiscovery PM? Roll Up Your Sleeves. – eDiscovery Trends 150 150 CloudNine

I received an intriguing announcement from The Organization of Legal Professionals (OLP) regarding a new five month intensive certificate course in eDiscovery Project Management. The first course begins on November 13 and runs through the end of April, meeting essentially weekly with all classes recorded so that you can catch up if you miss one. Here are some details about the program.

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Proximity Searches Can Be the Right Balance of Recall and Precision – eDiscovery Best Practices
Proximity Searches Can Be the Right Balance of Recall and Precision – eDiscovery Best Practices 150 150 CloudNine

When performing keyword searching, the challenge to performing those searches effectively is to balance recall (retrieving responsive documents with hits) and precision (not retrieving too many non-responsive documents with hits). A search that has 100% precision will contain only responsive documents; however, that does not mean that all of the responsive documents have been retrieved. A search that has 100% recall will contain all of the responsive documents in the collection; however, it may also contain a large number of non-responsive documents, which can be drive up review costs. So, how to perform searches that effectively balance recall and precision?

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eDiscovery Sanctions Can Happen in Police Brutality Cases Too – eDiscovery Case Law
eDiscovery Sanctions Can Happen in Police Brutality Cases Too – eDiscovery Case Law 150 150 CloudNine

As reported in the Seattle Times, Pierce County (Washington) Superior Court Judge Stephanie Arend issued a $300,000 sanction against King County for failure to produce key documents illustrating the previous troubling behavior of a sheriff deputy who tackled Christopher Sean Harris and left him permanently brain-damaged. Judge Arend also indicated that the county would be liable for attorneys’ fees and possibly compensatory damages for the Harris family. This after King County had settled with the Harris family for $10 million in January 2011 during a civil trial in King County Superior Court.

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EDBP.com, A Lawyer Centric Work Flow Model for eDiscovery – eDiscovery Best Practices
EDBP.com, A Lawyer Centric Work Flow Model for eDiscovery – eDiscovery Best Practices 150 150 CloudNine

Take a closer look – that’s not the EDRM model you see above. It’s the new EDBP model.
EDBP stands for Electronic Discovery Best Practices and is the brainchild of Ralph Losey, whose e-Discovery Team® blog is one of the must-read blogs (and one of the most in-depth) in the industry. Ralph is also National e-Discovery Counsel with the law firm of Jackson Lewis, LLP, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Florida College of Law teaching eDiscovery and advanced eDiscovery and has also previously been a thought leader interviewee on this blog. Other than all that, he’s not very busy.

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Twitter Turns Over Tweets in People v. Harris – eDiscovery Case Law
Twitter Turns Over Tweets in People v. Harris – eDiscovery Case Law 150 150 CloudNine

As reported by Reuters, Twitter has turned over Tweets and Twitter account user information for Malcolm Harris in People v. Harris, after their motion for a stay of enforcement was denied by the Appellate Division, First Department in New York and they faced a finding of contempt for not turning over the information. Twitter surrendered an “inch-high stack of paper inside a mailing envelope” to Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino, which will remain under seal while a request for a stay by Harris is heard in a higher court.

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Don’t Be “Duped”, Files with Different HASH Values Can Still Be the Same – eDiscovery Best Practices
Don’t Be “Duped”, Files with Different HASH Values Can Still Be the Same – eDiscovery Best Practices 150 150 CloudNine

A couple of months ago, we published a post discussing how the number of pages in each gigabyte can vary widely and, to help illustrate the concept, we took one of our blog posts and put it into several different file formats to illustrate how each file had the same content, yet was a different size. That’s not the only concept that example illustrates.

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Home Depot’s “Extremely Broad” Request for Social Media Posts Denied – eDiscovery Case Law
Home Depot’s “Extremely Broad” Request for Social Media Posts Denied – eDiscovery Case Law 150 150 CloudNine

In Mailhoit v. Home Depot, Magistrate Judge Suzanne Segal ruled that the three out of four of the defendant’s discovery requests failed Federal Rule 34(b)(1)(A)’s “reasonable particularity” requirement, were, therefore, not reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence and were denied.

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Inadvertent Disclosure? Got Clawback? – eDiscovery Best Practices
Inadvertent Disclosure? Got Clawback? – eDiscovery Best Practices 150 150 CloudNine

As discovery becomes more complex and voluminous, it seems as though we’re seeing more and more cases where inadvertent disclosures of privileged documents are becoming more common. In just the past couple of months, we’ve discussed two cases on this blog, where the producing parties were forced to waive privilege of those documents when they failed the now popular five factor test to determine whether an inadvertent disclosure entitles the producing party to have the documents returned. Perhaps if they had a well-defined “clawback” agreement, the results would have been different?

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Plaintiffs Should Pay for Extensive Discovery Prior to Class Certification – eDiscovery Case Law
Plaintiffs Should Pay for Extensive Discovery Prior to Class Certification – eDiscovery Case Law 150 150 CloudNine

In Boeynaems v. LA Fitness International, LLC, Pennsylvania District Judge Michael Baylson held that “where (1) class certification is pending and (2) the plaintiffs have asked for very extensive discovery, compliance with which will be very extensive, that absent compelling equitable circumstances to the contrary, the plaintiffs should pay for the discovery they seek . . . . Where the burden of discovery expense is almost entirely on the defendant, principally because the plaintiffs seek class certification, then the plaintiffs should share the costs.”

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