Our Insights on eDiscovery

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

April 6, 2011

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.

eDiscovery Best Practices: Testing Your Search Using Sampling

April 5, 2011

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.

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

April 4, 2011

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.

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

April 1, 2011

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?

Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: The Evaluation Process

March 31, 2011

Sometimes selecting a service provider for a project will be a quick, easy process. You may have a small project — similar to others you’ve handled — that you need to get up and running quickly. If you have a list of good vendors with which you’ve worked, it may be as easy as a phone call or two to check availability and you’ll be all set. In other cases, your selection process may be more involved. Perhaps you are looking to build a preferred vendor program or you’ve got a large case involving many stakeholders who are looking for a thorough evaluation. When a thorough evaluation is needed, here’s a suggested approach.

eDiscovery Case Law: Destroy Data, Pay $1 Million, Lose Case

March 30, 2011

A federal judge in Chicago has levied sanctions against Rosenthal Collins Group LLC and granted a default judgment to the defendant for misconduct in a patent infringement case, also ordering the Chicago-based futures broker’s counsel to pay “the costs and attorneys fees incurred in litigating this motion” where plaintiff’s agent modified metadata related to relevant source code and wiped several relevant disks and devices prior to their production and where the court found counsel participated in “presenting misleading, false information, materially altered evidence and willful non-compliance with the Court’s orders.”

Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Other Evaluation Criteria

March 29, 2011

In the last posts in this blog series, we talked about evaluating service provider pricing, quality, scalability and flexibility. There are a few other things you may wish to look at as well, that may be especially significant for large, long-term projects or relationships.

eDiscovery Trends: Forbes on the Rise of Predictive Coding

March 28, 2011

First the New York Times with an article about eDiscovery, now Forbes. Who’s next, The Wall Street Journal? 😉 Forbes published a blog post entitled E-Discovery And the Rise of Predictive Coding a few days ago. Written by Ben Kerschberg, Founder of Consero Group LLC, it gets into some legal issues and considerations regarding predictive coding that are interesting. For some background on predictive coding, check out our December blog posts.

eDiscovery Best Practices: Does Size Matter?

March 25, 2011

I frequently get asked how big does an ESI collection need to be to benefit from eDiscovery technology. In a recent case with one of my clients, the client had a fairly small collection – only about 4 GB. But, when a judge ruled that they had to start conducting depositions in a week, they needed to review that data in a weekend. Without FirstPass™, powered by Venio FPR™ to cull the data and OnDemand® to manage the linear review, they would not have been able to make that deadline. So, they clearly benefited from the use of eDiscovery technology in that case. But, if you’re not facing a tight deadline, how large does your collection need to be for the use of eDiscovery technology to provide benefits?

eDiscovery Best Practices: Is Disclosure of Search Terms Required?

March 24, 2011

I read a terrific article a couple of days ago from the New York Law Journal via Law Technology News entitled Search Terms Are More Than Mere Words, that had some interesting takes about the disclosure of search terms in eDiscovery. The article was written by David J. Kessler, Robert D. Owen, and Emily Johnston of Fulbright & Jaworski. The primary emphasis of the article was with regard to the forced disclosure of search terms by courts.