Our Insights on eDiscovery

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has announced new Guidelines for counsel and litigants regarding the discovery of electronically stored information (“ESI”) effective as of last Tuesday (November 27). The Guidelines were developed by a bench-bar committee chaired by Magistrate Judge Elizabeth D. Laporte in partnership with the Court’s Rules Committee and unanimously approved by the entire Court.

As reported by Law Technology News and the Litigation Support News and Information Blog, Document Technologies Inc. (DTI), the nation’s largest independent provider of discovery services, facilities management, and knowledge process outsourcing has acquired Fios Inc., one of the electronic discovery industry’s most recognized brands. The new company will be known as “Fios, A DTI Company.”

Last year, The Sedona Conference® made a public comments version of the Cooperation Proclamation: Resources for the Judiciary available on the Sedona Conference website. The Resources for the Judiciary document aims to provide judges with a foundation for creating a collaborative and non-adversarial approach to managing eDiscovery. Now, its Judicial Resources guide has been updated and the free version is available on the Sedona Conference web site.

By now, you’ve probably heard that, on Tuesday, Hewlett-Packard (HP) took an $8.8 billion charge resulting from its acquisition of Autonomy back in 2011, one of the largest acquisitions in the eDiscovery industry in history. HP has called on US and British authorities to investigate what it called “serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy” before the acquisition in a developing scandal that also involves accounting firms Deloitte and KPMG, who audited the sale.