Our Insights on eDiscovery

Today’s thought leader is Jason R. Baron. Jason has served as National Archives’ Director of Litigation since 2000 and is Co-Chair of the Working Group on Electronic Document Retention and Production for the Sedona Conference. Jason is also one of the founding coordinators of the TREC Legal Track, a search project organized through the National Institute of Standards and Technology to evaluate search protocols used in eDiscovery. This year, Jason was awarded the Emmett Leahy Award for Outstanding Contributions and Accomplishments in the Records and Information Management Profession.

There was an interesting post in the EDD Update blog a few days ago entitled Ediscovery Production Without Review, written by Albert Barsocchini, Esq. The post noted that due to “[a]dvanced analytics, judicial acceptance of computer aided coding, claw back/quick-peek agreements, and aggressive use of Rule 16 hearings”, many attorneys are choosing to produce responsive ESI without spending time and money on a final linear review. A colleague of mine sent me an email with a link to the post and stated, “I would not hire a firm if I knew they were producing without a doc by doc review.” So, when (if ever) is it OK to produce without linear review?

eDiscoveryDaily thought quite a bit about what to get for our readers to celebrate these holidays, and what better to give you than interviews with some of the most influential thought leaders in eDiscovery today! Jason Krause has been working hard and “chased” down several well respected individuals and, as a result, we’re pleased to introduce the schedule for the series, which will begin this Wednesday, December 14. Here are the interviews that we will be publishing over the next two weeks!

Effective communication is a key part of effective project management, whether that communication is internally within the project team or externally with your client. It is so easy for miscommunications to occur that can derail your project and cause deadlines to be missed, or work product to be incomplete or not meet the client’s expectations. That’s why I like to employ a “belt and suspenders” approach to communication with clients.

A few days ago, I reviewed search syntax that one of my clients had prepared and noticed a couple of “gotchas” that typically cause problems. While we’ve discussed them on this blog before, it was over a year ago (when eDiscovery Daily was still in its infancy and had a fraction of the readers it has today), so it bears covering them again.

We’re pleased to announce that our blog post “eDiscovery Best Practices: Could This Be the Most Expensive eDiscovery Mistake Ever?”, regarding Google’s inadvertent disclosure during its litigation with Oracle was selected as the Pick of the Week from TechnoLawyer in the November 21, 2011 issue of LitigationWorld. LitigationWorld is a free weekly email newsletter that provides helpful tips regarding electronic discovery, litigation strategy, and litigation technology. It’s also a great source of ideas for blog posts!

Yesterday, we talked about addressing parameters of production up front to ensure that those requirements make sense and avoid foreseeable production problems well before the production step. Today, we will talk about quality control (QC) mechanisms to make sure that the production is complete and accurate. There are a number of checks that can and should be performed on the production set, prior to producing it to the requesting party. Here are some examples.