Close
Enter your
text here

Electronic Discovery

Get Ready for “E-Discovery Day” and a Milestone for LitSupport Guru: eDiscovery Trends

This is sort of a “two birds with one stone” post…

We have days to celebrate all sorts of things.  According to the website Days of the Year, yesterday was “Apple Dumpling Day” and today is “Respect Day”.  Now, eDiscovery enthusiasts have an event to look forward to – “E-Discovery Day”, on December 1st of this year.  Mark your calendars.

Brought to you by EDRM, Exterro, Actiance and Today’s General Counsel, E-Discovery Day (as stated in their website) is “an industry wide initiative aimed at promoting e-discovery awareness and education. E-Discovery Day will bring together a diverse set of professionals to share experiences, discuss key trends and offer best practices over a variety of mediums with the goal of facilitating and promoting e-discovery education to the entire legal and business community.”

George Socha, founder of EDRM, states that “E-discovery is going to be with us for the long haul, which means that all of us working to resolve disputes need to improve our e-discovery IQ. With its webinars, content and other events, E-Discovery Day offers each of us a great opportunity to do just that.”

Featured speakers include Socha, David Yerich, Director of eDiscovery for UnitedHealth Group and Bob Rohlf  Counsel at Exterro.  The site currently lists four webinar events, including:

  • 2015 E-Discovery Case Law: Sanction Cases You Need to Know
  • Taking Advantage of the New FRCP E-Discovery Amendments
  • Make Your Job Easier with E-Discovery Technology
  • 3 E-Discovery Trends You Need to Prepare for in 2016

The sessions are presented by Exterro and you can register for them on the site.  You can also submit an event for inclusion on the site as well, so it sounds as though additional events will be added.  You can sign up for the E-Discovery Day newsletter to receive updates, so if you do, you’ll presumably know about additional events as they add them.

For more information or to register for the newsletter or one (or more) of the events, click here.

BTW, it’s a good thing the event wasn’t scheduled for tomorrow – that’s one of my favorite days – “Talk Like a Pirate Day”.  That could have been awkward.

Also, a congrats to Amy Bowser-Rollins and her excellent blog, Litigation Support Guru, on celebrating their four year anniversary!  Amy’s blog is one of my favorites for litigation support best practices, several of which I’ve shared on this blog.  I also finally had the pleasure of meeting Amy at ILTA a few weeks ago, after having corresponded with her on several occasions.  Earlier this year, Amy had the guts to “quit her day job” and focus on litigation support education, which is great for our industry.  Keep up the great work, Amy!

Speaking of anniversaries, we have our own coming up over the weekend.  Stay tuned for our post on Monday!

So, what do you think?  Will “E-Discovery Day” catch on?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Plaintiff’s Continued Disputes with Curling Iron Manufacturer Getting Hairy: eDiscovery Case Law

In Wilson v. Conair Corp., 1:14-cv-00894-WBS-SAB (E.D. Cal. Aug. 17, 2015), California Magistrate Judge Stanley A. Boone denied the plaintiff’s motion for the Court to establish dates by which the defendant must produce ESI and ordered the parties to meet and confer (again), warning that if the parties could not reach a resolution, all counsel would be required to personally appear before the court and be prepared to engage in an extended, court-supervised meet and confer session that could require an all-day appearance.

Case Background

In this product liability class action, the plaintiff previously filed a motion to compel which was granted in part and denied in part on April 30, in which the defendant was ordered to produce further ESI in native format if feasible or TIFF format with the associated metadata, as well as to produce associated metadata for its prior production if it had not already done so.  In addition, the plaintiff also filed a motion to compel production of “all Products returned to Conair for problems related to sparking, flashing, popping, fires, or any line cord failure or malfunction” for testing.  Judge Boone denied that motion since the action was “still in the pre-class certification stage of discovery”.

In the joint statement, the plaintiff included a motion to compel production of discovery granted in the Court’s prior order, seeking to have the Court establish dates by which Defendant must produce e-mails and additional consumer complaints.  The defendant objected, contending that the plaintiff added this second motion to compel after the joint statement had been approved by the defendant and without providing the defendant with an opportunity to address the motion.

Judge’s Ruling

Agreeing with the defendant, Judge Boone denied the plaintiff’s motion for the Court to establish dates by which Defendant must produce ESI discovery, stating that the “parties are ordered to meet and confer in an attempt to establish the appropriate scope of the discovery requested and an acceptable timeline for Defendant to produce documents responsive to discovery requests”.

To provide a little motivation for a cooperative meet and confer session, Judge Boone added this:

“The parties have shown that meet and confer efforts in this action have not been successful in resolving these disputes and each assert it is due to the fault of the other party. Due to the parties’ inability to meet and confer and resolve these issues, the parties are advised that the personal appearance of all counsel shall be required for any further motion to compel that is filed with the Court. The parties are encouraged to work together during meet and confer sessions prior to any scheduled hearing. However, if a resolution is not reached prior to the scheduled hearing, the parties shall be required to personally appear and should plan to engage in an extended meet and confer session with the assistance of the Court which could require an all-day appearance on the day of the scheduled hearing.”

So, what do you think?  Should more courts propose to preside over meet and confer sessions?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Is Your Outlook PST File Corrupt? All is Not Lost!: eDiscovery Best Practices

With our 5 year anniversary coming up this weekend and my having experienced this issue with a client recently, it seemed to make sense to revisit this topic.

Though we’d like to believe that there will never be any problems with the data that we preserve, collect and process for eDiscovery purposes, data is not perfect.  Sometimes the most critical data may be difficult or impossible to use.  For example, key files could be password protected from being opened or they could be corrupted.  If an Outlook Personal Storage Table (PST) file is corrupted, that file corruption could literally make tens of thousands of documents unavailable for discovery unless the file can be repaired.

I have a client who regularly sends us PST files to be processed and loaded via CloudNine’s Discovery Client processing application into our CloudNine review platform (double shameless plug warning!).  But, sometimes, the PST files that we have received have been corrupted.  Once, I had a case where 40% of the collection was contained in 2 corrupt Outlook PST files.  Without the ability to repair those files, we would have been unable to access key portions of the collections in these cases that needed to be processed and reviewed.

Fortunately, there is a repair tool for Outlook designed to repair corrupted PST files.  It’s called SCANPST.  It’s an official repair tool that has been included since Office 2007.  Despite the fact that it’s a “tool”, you won’t find SCANPST in the Microsoft Office Tools folder within the Microsoft Office folder in Program files.  Instead, you’ll have to navigate to the C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice14 folder (for Office 2010) or C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice15 (for Office 2013) to find the SCANPST.EXE utility.

Double-click this file to open Microsoft Outlook Inbox Repair Tool.  The utility will prompt for the path and name of the PST file (with a Browse button to browse to the corrupted PST file).  There is also an Options button to enable you to log activity to a new log file, append to an existing log file or choose not to write to a log file.  Before you start, you’ll need to close Outlook and all mail-enabled applications.

Once ready, press the Start button and the application will begin checking for errors. When the process is complete, it should indicate that it found errors on the corrupted file, along with a count of folders and items found in the PST file.  The utility will also provide a check box to make a backup of the scanned file before repairing.  ALWAYS make a backup – you never know what might happen during the repair process.  Click the Repair button when ready and the utility will hopefully repair the corrupted PST file.

If SCANPST.EXE fails to repair the file, then there are some third party utilities available that may succeed where SCANPST failed.  If all else fails, you can hire a data recovery expert (like us).  Of course, sometimes files are beyond repair, regardless of the utility.

By repairing the PST file, you are technically changing the file, so if the PST file is discoverable, it may be necessary to disclose the corruption to opposing counsel and the intent to attempt to repair the file to avoid potential spoliation claims.

So, what do you think?  Have you encountered corrupted PST files in discovery?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Our Nation’s Largest City Now Has a Dedicated eDiscovery Group in its Law Department: eDiscovery Trends

If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

The New York City Law Department has created an electronic discovery group that will be dedicated to assisting the agency’s litigators with preserving and producing electronic evidence.

As reported in the New York Law Journal (NYC Law Department Creates E-Discovery Unit, by Andrew Keshner), Corporation Counsel Zachary Carter said in an internal announcement that the department had moved eDiscovery duties from the department’s Litigation Support Division into a new, separate unit “to meet the increasing demands of e-discovery”.

According to the article, Kenneth A. Becker, co-chair of the department’s Electronic Evidence Committee since 2004, will head the group and Daniel Lim will be deputy director.  About 7,000 cases are filed against the city each year, according to budget testimony from Carter in March – at that time, he testified that the torts division alone was defending approximately 20,000 cases.

According to the New York City Law Department Year in Review summary for 2014, the Litigation Support department helped expand electronic discovery in almost every litigating division, including large public policy and commercial cases with millions of documents as well as counseling client agencies on electronic record retention policies and litigation readiness strategies.  The department also supervised and managed completion of 600-plus agency affidavits in support of motions for summary judgment, as well as supervising and managing production of discovery responses in 2,700-plus matters.  So, they are certainly a busy group!  Now, a new dedicated group within the NYC Law Department will manage its eDiscovery.

So, what do you think?  Will other large cities follow suit, if they haven’t already?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Defendant Gets Summary Judgment, Not Dismissal, Due to Plaintiff’s Wiping of Hard Drive: eDiscovery Case Law

In Watkins v. Infosys, 14-0247 (W.D. Wa., July 23, 2015), Washington District Judge John C. Coughenour denied the defendant’s Motion for the Sanction of Dismissal but granted the defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment against the plaintiff for spoliation of data due to her use of “Disk Wiping” software to delete ESI.

Case Background

In this discrimination case, the defendant’s forensic expert determined that the plaintiff performed a Bing search for the term “disk wipe” and downloaded and installed file wiping software onto the hard drive of her work computer around October 20, 2013, and ran the program to wipe files.  In addition, eleven external media drives had been connected to the plaintiff’s laptop in the days prior to the disk wipe.  Furthermore, the plaintiff perjured herself when she stated that “she did not `remove’ things from Defendant’s premises,” and that she “followed procedures typical with such litigation . . . to avoid the alteration or deletion of documents, in addition to preserving data back-ups relating to her employment.”

The plaintiff ultimately admitted in her deposition that she wiped the files, claiming that she did so out of concern for information preservation and client confidentiality.  In a supplemented response filed on the last day of discovery, the plaintiff again refused to turn over the wiped contents of her work computer, claiming that all of the files passed through the defendant’s servers (so the defendant presumably had copies), that the unproduced files were “vast and irrelevant to the claims or controversies in this case” and that she was “in the process of replicating all documents that she retained and will provide the same to Defendant upon their soonest availability.”

Judge’s Ruling

Judge Coughenour stated that he found the plaintiff’s responses “both illogical and unbelievable”, noting that her “brief in response to Defendant’s motion for the sanction of dismissal only exacerbates the problem…There, Plaintiff regurgitates flimsy justifications for wiping her disk drive, doubles-down on her unsupported argument about the irrelevance of the wiped files, and asserts blankly that “there has been no actual suppression or withholding of evidence since the entire content of Plaintiff’s computer has been produced to Defendant.”

With the spoliation (and associated perjury) clear, Judge Coughenour then turned his attention to determining the appropriate sanctions.  To consider dismissal, he noted the requirement to weigh five factors: (1) the public’s interest in expeditious resolution of litigation, (2) the court’s need to manage its dockets, (3) the risk of prejudice to the party seeking sanctions, (4) the public policy favoring the disposition of cases on their merits, and (5) the availability of less drastic sanctions.  Reviewing the five factors, Judge Coughenour found “that three weigh in favor of dismissal and two do not” and, while describing it as “an incredibly close call”, he stated that “the Court prefers to address this case, finally, on its merits.”  Therefore, he denied the defendant’s motion for dismissal, opting instead to grant a motion for summary judgment.  Judge Coughenour also ordered plaintiff’s counsel to show cause as to why sanctions should not be issued against them.

So, what do you think?  Should the court have granted the motion for dismissal?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Need Help with Cross Border Discovery? The Sedona Conference Has a New Guide for You!: eDiscovery Best Practices

Cross-border discovery presents a growing challenge for courts, privacy authorities, companies, employees, counsel, and requesting parties.  Discovery and Data Protection Laws vary widely around the world, and these laws may conflict.  Foreign countries have differing notions of privacy and discovery than we do here in the US.  Now, The Sedona Conference® has created a guide of practical in-house approaches to help.

The Sedona Conference Working Group 6 on International Electronic Information Management, Discovery and Disclosure (WG6) – the Working Group responsible for The Sedona Conference International Principles on Discovery, Disclosure and Data Protection (“International Litigation Principles”), has released for public comment a new guide titled Practical In-House Approaches for Cross-Border Discovery and Data Protection (“Practical Approaches”).

In order to maximize the value of the International Litigation Principles for organizations and in-house counsel, WG6 has drafted Practical Approaches to provide consensus-based practical guidance and solutions for the cross-border data transfer and discovery challenges that many organizations and in-house counsel regularly confront.  The 49 page guide (which includes extensive appendices) includes the following sections:

  • In-House Perspectives on Discovery and Data Protection: Describes the differing notions of privacy and discovery that exist around the world today;
  • The Sedona Conference International Principles on Discovery, Disclosure & Data Protection: Recap of the six international principles originally introduced in the International Litigation Principles Guide;
  • Practice Points for Conducting Cross-Border Discovery in View of Data Protection and Data Privacy Regulations: Eight detailed practice points, each that provide a hypothetical situation, for addressing everything from the need to proceed deliberately in countries with comprehensive Data Protection Laws to releasing legal holds and return or dispose of data promptly upon termination of a matter;
  • Practical Approaches Appendices: The Sedona Conference In-House Tool Kit for Data Protection and Cross-Border Discovery: A handful of useful documents that include an 18 page eDiscovery and Data Protection Model Guideline (which includes answers to FAQs), a Template Cross-Border Discovery Management Form for In-House eDiscovery Teams, a one page Talking Points Infographic for Internal Business Clients and Employees and an Exemplar Heat Map of Data Protection and Data Privacy Regulations.

The PDF guide can be downloaded here.  As always, it’s free!

The Practical Approaches guide is open for public comment through December 15, 2015. Questions and comments can be sent to comments@sedonaconference.org.  After reviewing the comments, the drafting team expects to publish a “final” version early next year.  In addition, a 90-minute webinar will be scheduled for later this fall to address questions you may have to a panel selected from the drafting team, and will be announced on The Sedona Conference web page.

So, what do you think?  Does your organization struggle with cross-border discovery?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Information Governance Now Has its Own Conference: eDiscovery Trends

If you’re not “conferenced-out” by last week’s ILTACON (which we covered before, during and after the show), here is a brand new conference dedicated to Information Governance for you to check out.

InfoGovCon (going by the hashtag #InfoGovCon2015) is being hosted by the Information Governance Initiative (IGI) from September 29 to October 1 in Hartford, CT.  That’s less than three weeks away!

The sessions begin at 1:00pm on Tuesday, September 29 and continue through Thursday, October 1 at 12:30pm.  Most of the sessions are single track presentations and panels, with a handful of breakout sessions where there are two to four sessions to choose from during those times.  They have assembled an impressive list of speakers, including:

  • Aaron Crews, Senior Associate General Counsel & Global Head of eDiscovery at Walmart
  • Richard P. Kessler, Executive Director and Head of Group Information Governance, IT Contracting and Shared Services Legal at UBS
  • Jeffrey D. Bridges, Director of Information Governance at Boehringer Ingelheim USA
  • Jessica Harman, Records & Information Management Supervisor at Phillips 66
  • Jeff Kosseff, Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity Law at the United States Naval Academy
  • Russel M. Walters, Ph.D., Research Associate Director and a fellow at Johnson & Johnson

The sessions are also relatively short, with most sessions either 30 or 45 minutes max.  So, they will be covering a lot!  Here is a link to the agenda for the conference.  There’s also an exhibition area and “data art gallery”.  Interesting!

There will also be a reception and award ceremony the first evening and a breakfast and lunch the second day to socialize with your fellow IG junkies.  You can still nominate and vote for IG award winners here for IG Professional of the year, IG Evangelist of the year and other awards.  Voting will end on September 18.

The conference will be held at the Connecticut Convention Center.  Tickets for the entire conference are $399 per person, with group rates available for three or more attendees.  And, if you use the promo code IGI15 when registering, you can save $50!

It’s your chance to get in on the ground floor and say you were there at the beginning.  And, if you need any other reasons to attend (or convince your boss that you should attend), here are seven other reasons.

So, what do you think?  Are you a big proponent of Information Governance?  If so, are you attending #InfoGovCon2015?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

The Four V’s of Big Data: eDiscovery Trends

I love infographics!  A picture is truly worth a thousand words.  So, when I saw this infographic about big data, I felt I needed to share it.

Courtesy of IBM (which I found via the blog Stephen’s Lighthouse), The Four V’s of Big Data shows the Volume, Variety, Velocity and Veracity of big data and provides interesting tidbits, such as:

  • 40 zettabytes (43 trillion gigabytes) of data will be created by 2020, which is 300 times the data volume of 2005;
  • 6 billion people have cell phones (out of 7 billion people in the world);
  • By 2016, it is projected that there will be 18.9 billion network connections (almost 2.5 connections per person on earth);
  • 4 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each month, 400 million tweets are sent per day and 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month;
  • Yet, 1 in 3 business leaders don’t trust the information they use to make decisions and poor data quality costs the US economy around $3.1 trillion per year.

As always, the volume and quality of data affects organizations from both an information governance and eDiscovery standpoint, so these fun facts can be useful in conveying the challenges those organizations face today in trying to manage it all and meet their obligations.  Did you like those fun facts?  Here are some more.

So, what do you think?  How is your organization coping with big data?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Court Rules that State Agency is Not Responsible for Emails Deleted via the Retention Policy of Another State Agency: eDiscovery Case Law

In Wandering Dago, Inc. v. N.Y. State Office of Gen. Servs., No. 1:13-CV-1053 (MAD/RFT), (N.D.N.Y. May 29, 2015), New York Magistrate Judge Randolph F. Treece denied the plaintiff’s request for sanctions, stating that “that neither the individual Defendants nor their Attorney had a duty to preserve” the emails of the Deputy Secretary of Gaming and Racing to the President of the New York Racing Authority (“NYRA”).

Case Background

In this First Amendment case where the plaintiff contended that a set of NYRA Defendants and another set of state actors violated the First (Free Speech Clause) and Fourteenth (Equal Protection Clause) Amendments of the United States Constitution for denying its food trucks to provide services at the Saratoga Race Course and an outdoor lunch program based on the plaintiff company’s name.  The plaintiff’s exclusion from the race track occurred after several complaints were received, including an email from the Deputy Secretary at the NYRA, concerned that “the fallout from authorizing this truck will inevitably land on NYRA”.

After the media reported that “an unidentified state official” complained, the Deputy Secretary emailed the Governor’s Executive Chamber identifying himself as that official and he was eventually identified in court as that “unidentified state official”. However, the NYRA eventually settled and the Deputy Secretary was never named as a defendant, leaving the employees of the Office of General Services (“OGS”), who had denied the plaintiff’s applications for the outdoor lunch program, as the remaining defendants.

During discovery, the plaintiff requested production of the non-party Deputy Secretary’s emails, but they had been automatically destroyed pursuant to New York State’s Email Retention Policy. As a result, the plaintiff thereafter sought an adverse inference (as well as further discovery, costs and attorneys’ fees) against the remaining OGS defendants and their litigation counsel – an Assistant Attorney General – for the deletion of the Deputy Secretary’s emails.  The defendants objected, citing that they had no control over the Deputy Secretary’s emails and litigation counsel did not represent the nonparty Deputy Secretary at the time of the automatic deletions and had no legal authority to direct a preservation hold.

Judge’s Ruling

Judge Treece, agreeing with the defendants, stated that “the individual Defendants correctly assert that they have no control over {the Deputy Secretary’s} emails, the Executive Chamber’s emails, or over other emails pertaining to NYRA. Instead, when litigation was commenced against them, they and their agency, OGS, met their obligation by preserving those documents that were within their control and possession, and ultimately disclosed 1000 pages of documents relevant to the Empire Plaza Summer Program, including emails.”

Continuing, Judge Treece stated that the “Plaintiff suffers under the erroneous notion that when a governmental agency and its officials are defendants in any litigation, they and their counsel are required to preserve and produce documents belonging to another governmental agency.”  He also stated that “[c]onsidering that hundreds of lawsuits are filed daily against New York State,” that “requiring each agency and thousands of officials to institute a litigation hold every time a party contemplates or even commences litigation against another agency would paralyze the State.”  Finding that the plaintiff had also failed to prove a culpable state of mind and also failed to prove that the missing evidence would have been favorable to it, Judge Treece found that the plaintiff had failed to meet its burden and denied its request for sanctions, as well as its request for additional discovery and costs and attorney fees.

So, what do you think?  Should each state agency have its own separate duty to preserve or should the entire state be responsible to preserve data?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

Observations from ILTACON: eDiscovery Trends

Just flew back from ILTACON 2015 (and, boy are my arms tired!).  Even though Caesars Palace is not pager friendly, it was a terrific venue for the show again (after having been held there two years ago).  Between various meetings to pay the bills (we all have to), I found time to attend a few sessions.  Here are a few brief observations from the show and sessions.

Innovations

Catch Box: One of the unique innovations for encouraging and managing audience participation was the “catch box” (pictured above), which was a soft box containing a microphone.  You could actually throw it to the next person with a comment and it was soft, yet durable (at least in the sessions that I attended).  I used it myself when presenting at the 20 E-Discovery Warnings session that is described below.  Maybe it will “catch” on for future shows!

ILTACon App: Once again this year, ILTA provided an app that you could download to your iPhone or Android that provided all sorts of information, including maps of the exhibit hall and conference center, an activity feed, agenda for each day with details about the event (including date and time, location, speakers, etc.), details about the speakers and exhibitors, even the ability to look up attendees to see if your colleagues from past shows would be there!  Spiffy!  You could also add agenda items to your own personal agenda so that you would be reminded when those events were coming up.  Two suggestions for improvement: 1) Add the ability to add the agenda item to your Outlook calendar so that you can avoid booking meetings during the sessions that you want to attend and 2) Add a GPS feature to the Maps section so that you can see where you are in relation to where you need to go (I know that’s asking a lot, but it would be really cool.

Kendeo: Outside of the exhibit hall, there was a big board with instructions to read from several thought provoking questions, put your answer on a post-it note and post it on the board.  The artists from Kendeo, a team of talented training consultants, then represented those answers in cartoon form.  Here’s an example below – the cartoons and renderings made for a unique form of interaction!

Sessions

There were several good sessions at this year’s show.  Three sessions that I particularly enjoyed:

Litigation Support Roundtable: Moderated by Joanne Lane of Merck and Stephen Dooley of Sullivan & Cromwell, the session started off with a question asked of attendees (via provided iPads) as to the hot topics in litigation support today.  A majority of the discussion focused around technology and numerous attendees (via the “catch box”) discussed applications that they find useful to perform various litigation support functions – several of which were new to me.  I plan to find out about them and possibly cover several of them here on this blog.  Stay tuned.

To Share Or Not To Share: The Debate Over Disclosure of E-Discovery Protocols: In this session, the panelists (Patrick Oot of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, Julie Richer of American Electric Power, Philip Favro of Recommind and Alex Ponce de Leon of Google) argued mock cases in front of Judge Andrew Peck regarding the requirements for producing parties to share eDiscovery work product.  The cases included fictional names like Griswold LLC and a product liability claim by Coyote against Acme, Inc. (Oot, representing Acme, stated that Coyote was an “idiot” for never using their products right).  The debate and the rulings by Judge Peck were interesting and enlightening to see the factors considered in cases like these.

20 E-Discovery Warnings in 60 Minutes: This was the session in which I, along with nine of my colleagues, presented.  Each of us had two topics and six minutes (three minutes per topic) to cover them.  An excellent idea for covering a lot of best practices quickly (as I understand it, credit Julie Brown from Vorys for the idea).  Moderated by George Socha of Socha Consulting and Michael Boggs of Holland & Hart, the presenters also included Tom Barce of Kroll Ontrack, Douglas Brush of Kraft & Kennedy, Rodney Holaday of Vorys, Janice Jaco of Keesal, Young & Logan, Alex Lubarsky of CPA Global, Hal Marcus of Recommind, Brandon Mount of Accusoft, Scott Zimmerman of Haynes & Boone and Josh Zybershlag of Kroll Ontrack.  Kudos to David Horrigan of kCura for live tweeting during the session – the tweets are summarized here.

So, what do you think?  Did you attend ILTACON this year?  If so, what was your favorite part?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.