Our Insights on eDiscovery

eDiscovery Best Practices: You May Need to Collect from Custodians Who Aren’t There

July 9, 2012

A little over a week ago, we talked about how critical the first seven to ten days are in the case once litigation hits. Key activities to get a jump on the case include creating a list of key employees most likely to have documents relevant to the litigation and interviewing those key employees, as well as key department representatives, such as IT for information about retention and destruction policies. These steps are especially important as they may shed light on custodians you might not think about – the ones who aren’t there.

eDiscovery Trends: First Pass Review – Domain Categorization of Your Opponent’s Data

July 6, 2012

Yesterday, we talked about the use of First Pass Review (FPR) applications (such as FirstPass®, powered by Venio FPR™) to not only conduct first pass review of your own collection, but also to analyze your opponent’s ESI production. One way to analyze that data is through “fuzzy” searching to find misspellings or OCR errors in an opponent’s produced ESI. Another type of analysis is the use of domain categorization.

eDiscovery Trends: First Pass Review – Fuzzy Searching Your Opponent’s Data

July 5, 2012

Tuesday, we talked about the use of First Pass Review (FPR) applications (such as FirstPass®, powered by Venio FPR™) to not only conduct first pass review of your own collection, but also to analyze your opponent’s ESI production. One way to analyze that data is through synonym searching to find variations of your search terms to increase the possibility of finding the terminology used by your opponents. Another type of analysis is the use of fuzzy searching.

eDiscovery Trends: First Pass Review – Synonym Searching Your Opponent’s Data

July 3, 2012

Yesterday, we talked about the use of First Pass Review (FPR) applications (such as FirstPass®, powered by Venio FPR™) to not only conduct first pass review of your own collection, but also to analyze your opponent’s ESI production. One way to analyze that data is through email analytics to see the communication patterns graphically to identify key parties for deposition purposes and look for potential production omissions.

eDiscovery Trends: First Pass Review – of Your Opponent’s Data

July 2, 2012

In the past few years, applications that support Early Case Assessment (ECA) (or Early Data Assessment, as many prefer to call it) and First Pass Review (FPR) of ESI have become widely popular in eDiscovery as the analytical and culling benefits of conducting FPR have become obvious. The benefit of these FPR tools to analyze and cull their ESI before conducting attorney review and producing relevant files has become increasingly clear. But, nobody seems to talk about what these tools can do with opponent’s produced ESI.

eDiscovery Trends: Scanning May No Longer Be Cool, But it’s Still Necessary

June 29, 2012

Frankly, I thought the fax machine would have been retired by now. So many documents are generated electronically these days that I would have expected that most businesses would not only accept contracts and other documents via email but also no longer support fax receipt of those same documents. But, many business not only still receive faxes, some still only accept faxes for key documents (or require you to hand deliver). Likewise, most documents generated these days (as much as 99%) are never printed. Yet, I’m still surprised how many cases still have hard copy documents that require scanning.

eDiscovery Best Practices: When Litigation Hits, The First 7 to 10 Days is Critical

June 28, 2012

When a case is filed, several activities must be completed within a short period of time (often as soon as the first seven to ten days after filing) to enable you to assess the scope of the case, where the key electronically stored information (ESI) is located and whether to proceed with the case or attempt to settle with opposing counsel. Here are several of the key early activities that can assist in deciding whether to litigate or settle the case.

eDiscovery Best Practices: Judge Facciola Discusses Competency and Ethics

June 27, 2012

As noted in Law Technology News, eDiscovery vendor iConect hosted a free webinar last week entitled “Duty of Competency and E-Discovery”, in which Joshua Gilliland, author of Bow Tie Law’s Blog and founder of legal iPad app developer Majority Opinion, discussed ethics and eDiscovery with Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

eDiscovery Milestones: 100,000 Visits!

June 26, 2012

While it may not be “billions and billions served” like McDonalds nor quite as electrifying as 1.21 jigawatts, we’re proud to announce that yesterday eDiscoveryDaily reached the 100,000 visit milestone! As of this morning, we have had 100,160 visits to the site (reading 447 posts). On behalf of everyone at CloudNine Discovery who has worked on the blog over the last 21+ months, thanks to all of you who read the blog every day! In addition, thanks to the other publications that have picked up and either linked to or republished our posts! We really appreciate the support! Now, on to 200,000!

eDiscovery Case Law: “Naked” Assertions of Spoliation Are Not Enough to Grant Spoliation Claims

June 25, 2012

In Grabenstein v. Arrow Electronics, Inc., Colorado Magistrate Judge Kristen L. Mix denied the plaintiff’s motion for sanctions, finding that their claims of spoliation were based on “naked” assertions that relevant eMails must exist even though the plaintiff could not demonstrate that such other eMails do or did exist. The motion was also denied because the plaintiff could not establish when the defendant had deleted certain eMail messages, thereby failing to prove claims that the defendant violated its duty to preserve electronic evidence. Judge Mix noted that sanctions are not justified when documents are destroyed in good faith pursuant to a reasonable records-retention policy, if that’s prior to the duty to preserve such documents.