Our Insights on eDiscovery

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

Close
Enter your
text here

eDiscovery Case Law: Conclusion of Case Does Not Preclude Later Sanctions

In Green v. Blitz U.S.A., Inc., the defendant in a product liability action that had been settled over a year earlier was sanctioned for “blatant discovery abuses” prior to the settlement. Defendant was ordered to add $250,000 to its settlement with plaintiff, to provide a copy of the court’s order to every plaintiff in every lawsuit against defendant for the past two years or else forfeit an additional $500,000 “purging” sanction, and to include the order in its first responsive pleading in every lawsuit for the next five years in which defendant became involved.

read more

Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Is Checking References Important?

Over the years, I’ve been asked many times to serve as a reference for vendors with which I’ve worked. And, I’ve taken many reference-check phone calls. More often than not, those calls were less efficient and productive than they could have been — because they weren’t planned and good questions were not asked. In the next blogs in this series I’ll make some suggestions for doing an effective reference check.

read more

eDiscovery Best Practices: Your ESI Collection May Be Larger Than You Think

Here’s a sample scenario: You identify custodians relevant to the case and collect files from each. Roughly 100 gigabytes (GB) of Microsoft Outlook email PST files and loose “efiles” is collected in total from the custodians. You identify a vendor to process the files to load into a review tool, so that you can perform first pass review and, eventually, linear review and produce the files to opposing counsel. After processing, the vendor sends you a bill – and they’ve charged you to process over 200 GB!! What happened?!?

read more

eDiscovery Trends: Jurors and Social Media Don’t Mix

Discovery of social media is continuing to increase as a significant issue for organizations to address, with more and more cases addressing the topic, including this one and this one that have reached various conclusions regarding the discoverability of social media. However, when it comes to social media, courts agree on one thing: jurors and social media don’t mix. Courts have consistently rejected attempts by jurors to use social technology to research or to communicate about a case, and have increasingly provided pre-trial and post-closing jury instructions to jurors to dissuade them from engaging in this practice.

read more

Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Information to Provide in an RFP

Open, two-way communication with a service provider is absolutely critical to a successful project. It needs to start early, even before a project starts. For many projects, it starts with the Request for Proposal (RFP). Your goal with an RFP is to get good information from a vendor: information on pricing, information on schedule, information on approach, and information on deliverables. To give you complete, accurate information, they need information from you.

read more

eDiscovery Best Practices: Testing Your Search Using Sampling

Friday, we talked about how to determine an appropriate sample size to test your search results as well as the items NOT retrieved by the search, using a site that provides a sample size calculator. Yesterday, we talked about how to make sure the sample size is randomly selected. Today, we’ll walk through an example of how you can test and refine a search using sampling.

read more

eDiscovery Best Practices: A “Random” Idea on Search Sampling

Friday, we talked about how to determine an appropriate sample size to test your search results as well as the items NOT retrieved by the search, using a site that provides a sample size calculator. Today, we’ll talk about how to make sure the sample size is randomly selected.

read more

eDiscovery Best Practices: Determining Appropriate Sample Size to Test Your Search

We’ve talked about searching best practices quite a bit on this blog. One part of searching best practices (as part of the “STARR” approach I described in an earlier post) is to test your search results (both the result set and the files not retrieved) to determine whether the search you performed is effective at maximizing both precision and recall to the extent possible, so that you retrieve as many responsive files as possible without having to review too many non-responsive files. One question I often get is: how many files do you need to review to test the search?

read more