Our Insights on eDiscovery

Read on to learn more about the latest trends and insights in the world of digital discovery.

EDRM Announces Several Updates at Mid-Year Meeting – eDiscovery Trends

Last week, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) conducted its mid-year meeting to enable the working groups to meet and further accomplishments in each of the teams for the year. Having attended several of these meetings in the past, I’ve always found them to usually yield significant progress within the working groups, as well as providing a great opportunity for eDiscovery professionals to get together and talk shop. Based on the results of the meeting, EDRM issued an announcement with updates from several of their more active projects.

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Government Document Productions Can Be Like Water Torture – eDiscovery Case Law

In Botell v. United States, Magistrate Judge Gregory Hollows noted that the US Government’s “document production performance in these proceedings has been akin to a drop-by-drop water torture” and ordered a preclusion order prohibiting the US Government “from presenting evidence in its case that had been requested by plaintiffs in the Requests for Production, but which has not been produced” as of the date of the order. The US was also still required to produce the documents, whether they planned to use them or not. Judge Hollows also noted that the “Plaintiff has not waived any motion to seek further sanctions regarding non-production of documents, or spoliation of documents.”

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No Bates Numbers in a Native Production? Get Over It! – eDiscovery Best Practices

Last week, we discussed the benefits of requesting document productions in native format, including the ability to use Early Data Assessment/FirstPass Review applications to analyze your opponents produced data and metadata, using capabilities like email analytics and message thread analysis (where missing emails in threads can be identified), synonym searching, fuzzy searching and domain categorization. If you don’t understand the benefits of receiving the underlying metadata, try reviewing an image of an Excel spreadsheet and see if you can understand how the numbers were calculated without the underlying formulas. Not so easy, is it? However, one objection that attorneys provide against producing documents in native format is that they’re not conducive to Bates labeling.

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Avoiding the Redaction “Epic Fail” – eDiscovery Best Practices

On the surface, it may seem easy enough to redact a document during eDiscovery review to obscure confidential or privileged information. All you need to do is draw a black box over the affected text, right? Not so fast, my friend. There’s a lot more to consider in order to ensure that you don’t inadvertently produce information that was intended to be redacted. Here are a few redaction “epic fails” and how to avoid them.

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eDiscovery Training Valued More Than eDiscovery Certification – eDiscovery Trends

According to a survey conducted by eDJ Group and reported on by Barry Murphy within eDiscovery Journal (eDiscovery Education? Yes! eDiscovery Certification? Maybe…), almost all respondents believe that eDiscovery and education and training are important and three fourths of them believe that good eDiscovery education and training programs exist today. However, when it comes to the importance of eDiscovery certification programs and whether good programs exist today, slightly more than half of respondents responded favorably to eDiscovery certification programs.

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Defendant Appeals Sanctions, Only to See Sanction Amount Raised on Appeal – eDiscovery Case Law

In Multifeeder Tech. Inc. v. British Confectionery Co. Ltd., the defendant had been previously sanctioned $500,000 ($475,000 to the plaintiff and $25,000 to the court) and held in contempt of court by the magistrate judge for spoliation, who also recommended an adverse inference instruction be issued at trial. The defendant appealed to the district court, where Minnesota District Judge John Tunheim increased the award to the plaintiff to $600,000. Oops!

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