Our Insights on eDiscovery

eDiscovery Best Practices: What is “Reduping?”

March 22, 2011

As emails are sent out to multiple custodians, deduplication (or “deduping”) has become a common practice to eliminate multiple copies of the same email or file from the review collection, saving considerable review costs and ensuring consistency by not having different reviewers apply different responsiveness or privilege determinations to the same file. Deduping can be performed either across custodians in a case or within each custodian. Everyone who works in electronic discovery knows what “deduping” is. But how many of you know what “reduping” is?

eDiscovery Daily Celebrates its “Sixmonthiversary”

March 21, 2011

Six months ago yesterday, eDiscovery Daily was launched. At the time of our launch, we pondered whether we were crazy to commit to a daily blog (albeit restricted to business days). But, I guess it’s a sign of how much the eDiscovery industry has grown in that there has not been a shortage of topics to address; instead, the challenge has been selecting which topics to address. And, so far, we haven’t missed a business day yet (knock on wood!).

eDiscovery Case Law: Read Inadvertent Email, Get Disqualified from Case

March 18, 2011

Lesson of the day: When you receive an inadvertently sent privileged email, read it and don’t disclose receipt of it, you can get kicked off the case. In Terraphase Engineering, Inc., et al. v. Arcadis, U.S., Inc, the court disqualified defendant’s in-house and outside counsel for their handling of a disputed privileged email that was inadvertently sent by the plaintiffs’ counsel to the defendant and shared with defendant’s outside counsel.

eDiscovery Case Law: Deliberately Produce Wrong Cell Phone, Get Sanctioned

March 17, 2011

In Moreno v. Ostly, the California Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s award of monetary sanctions imposed against the plaintiff and her law firm in the amount of $13,500 for counsel and plaintiff’s discovery misconduct related to the preservation of text messages.

Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Evaluating Quality

March 16, 2011

Yesterday, we talked about evaluating service-provider pricing. That, of course, is just part of the picture. You need a service provider that can and does provide high-quality work that meets your expectations.

Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Evaluating Price

March 15, 2011

When you are looking for help with handling discovery materials, there are hundreds of service providers to choose from. It’s important that you choose one that can meet your schedule, has fair pricing and does high-quality work. But there are other things you should look at as well. In the next few blogs in this series, we’re going to discuss what you should be looking at when you evaluate a service provider. Note that these points are not covered in order of importance. The importance of any single evaluation point will vary from case to case and will depend on things like the type of service you are looking for, the duration of the project, the complexity of the project, and the size of the project. Let’s start with Price.

eDiscovery Trends: Despite What NY Times Says, Lawyers Not Going Away

March 14, 2011

There was a TV commercial in the mid-80’s where a soap opera actor delivered the line “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV”. A few days ago, The New York Times published an article entitled “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software” which discussed how, using ‘artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost’. The article goes on to discuss whether this will precipitate a march to the unemployment line for scores of attorneys.

eDiscovery Case Law: Spoliate Evidence, Don’t Go to Jail, but Pay a Million Dollars

March 11, 2011

As previously referenced in eDiscovery Daily, defendant Mark Pappas, President of Creative Pipe, Inc., was ordered by Magistrate Judge Paul W. Grimm to “be imprisoned for a period not to exceed two years, unless and until he pays to Plaintiff the attorney’s fees and costs that will be awarded to Plaintiff as the prevailing party”. However, ruling on the defendants’ appeal, District Court Judge Marvin J. Garbis declined to adopt the order regarding incarceration, stating: “[T]he court does not find it appropriate to Order Defendant Pappas incarcerated for future possible failure to comply with his obligation to make payment…”. So, how much is he ordered to pay? Now we know.

Working Successfully with eDiscovery and Litigation Support Service Providers: Introduction

March 10, 2011

If you work in a law firm or a corporate legal department, there will be times when you turn to a service provider to help with handling discovery materials — regardless of the technology and staff resources that you have. You might look to a service provider to handle work that your department doesn’t do. Or maybe your own resources are tied up and you just need more capacity. How to select the right provider, communicate effectively with that provider and ensuring high quality work (on time and on budget) are just some of the questions will be addressing in this new blog series.

eDiscovery Case Law: No Sanctions for Scrubbing Computers Assumed to be Imaged

March 9, 2011

When scrubbing data from a computer drive related to litigation, it’s a good idea to make absolutely sure that there is another copy of that data, via backup or forensic image. Don’t just take someone’s word for it. In Federal Trade Commission v. First Universal Lending, the FTC investigated the defendants for their mortgage modification practices by alleging that defendants had violated the Federal Trade Commission Act and that defendants had acted in violation of the Telemarketing Sales Rule. For the duration of the investigation, the court appointed a temporary receiver who took control of defendants’ business premises.