Industry Trends

Last year, I discussed what I want for Christmas (from an eDiscovery standpoint anyway) and we’ll take a look at those eDiscovery Christmas wishes and see how they turned out.  This year, I thought it would be fun to turn the tables and ask (again, from an eDiscovery standpoint): What Do YOU Want for Christmas?

Here are a couple of the things I wished for last year:

Consistency in Awarding Costs for eDiscovery Services: Last year, we discussed how we’ve seen numerous prevailing parties request recovery of costs, including eDiscovery costs and 28 U.S.C. § 1920 (especially §1920(4) is typically reference by judges in making the decisions.  However, it seemed through last year, that we’ve seen as many cases where the recovery costs are denied (or overturned on appeal) as we have where they are approved.  How did we do this year?

We didn’t cover a lot of cases related to recovery of costs this year (four in total: two cases where costs were awarded, one case where some eDiscovery costs were awarded and one case where recovery of eDiscovery costs was denied).  There is another case that we haven’t covered (at least yet) where costs were awarded.  So, not enough data to award anything other than an “incomplete”, but the trend may be tending toward awarding the costs.  We’ll see if that continues in 2016.

Rule 37(e) Won’t Give Producing Parties Too Much Latitude in Failing to Preserve Data: I know what you’re thinking – how can we assess this one given that the >new rules just went into effect on December 1?  Maybe we can’t.  However, would some courts begin to issue rulings that reflected the coming changes to Rule 37(e)?

So far, a cursory review of the cases we covered last year indicates there are still plenty of sanctions being issued.  Out of 24 cases that we covered this year where parties requested sanctions, 15 of them resulted in some sort of sanction being awarded.  Even though at least one party could escape sanctions despite failing to implement a litigation hold and another can manage to avoid a default judgment (twice) despite falsifying produced medical records and, later on, running CCLeaner on her hard drive to delete files, more parties than not received sanctions for their perceived eDiscovery failures in the cases we covered.  So far, so good – let’s see if that changes in 2016.

You can look at my other eDiscovery Christmas wishes from last year here.

But enough about me!  What about you?  What would you like for Christmas – from us?

At the end of every post (and there have been 1,318 published posts by us since our first day on September 20, 2010), I ask the readers to “Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.”  It’s my way of asking you what you’d like to see us cover in the blog.  After all, we write it for you.

So, what would you like to see us cover in the coming year?  More posts about Technology Assisted Review?  Information Governance?  More coverage of industry surveys and studies?  More thought leader interviews?  Guest posts?  After flying solo on the blog for over a year now (and, boy, are my arms tired!), I could go for that one!  More coverage of case law?  Though, having devoted 89 posts this year to eDiscovery case law. I’m not sure we can top that one… :o)

Regardless, we want to hear from you.  Please tell us what you want for gift for Christmas – from eDiscovery Daily!  We will do our best to deliver in this coming year and try not to leave you with a lump of coal (unless we cover a lawsuit involving coal mining!)

So, what do you think?  What do you want for Christmas gifts from eDiscovery Daily?  Maybe gift baskets for Christmas is the way to go? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.  Seriously.  I really mean it.

eDiscovery Daily is taking a break for the holidays (so I can rest my tired arms) and will return on Monday, January 4.

Happy Holidays from CloudNine Discovery!

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.

Consolidation within the eDiscovery industry continues.  Last week, Consilio announced a “definitive agreement” to acquire the Huron Legal Practice of Huron Consulting Group – their third acquisition in the past four months.  Yesterday, I interviewed Pete Feinberg, Senior Vice President, Products & Marketing at Consilio about the Huron Legal acquisition.

Huron Legal is one of Huron Consulting Group’s four operating segments and offers a variety of services to law firms and corporate law departments including eDiscovery, document review, information governance and compliance, law department management and legal analytics.  Huron Legal has operations primarily in the U.S., including Chicago, Charlotte, Raleigh, Miramar, New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Houston, as well as international locations.  Not to mention, a regular contributor to this blog… :o)

I asked Feinberg about the acquisition and why Huron Legal made sense as an acquisition target for the company.

“Huron Legal has really done a great job building a dominant position around document review and eDiscovery services, particularly in the US market, which was very attractive to us”, said Feinberg.  “Consilio has been strong in international eDiscovery and it was important for us to solidify a foothold here in the US.  Frankly, we couldn’t think of a better partner to do so than with Huron Legal, who has been providing great services to their clients for almost ten years now.”

“Beyond that, as we got to know the Huron Legal team better, we saw that there are more than a hundred consultants within the Huron Legal business unit focused in a variety of practice areas, including information governance, compliance, law department management and legal analytics.  Those practice areas are very attractive to Consilio as they are areas in which we have not been as strong historically.  But, we understand where the market is moving and, through engaging with our clients, we understand some of the added value that those consulting services and strategic relationships can afford.  Also, though both Consilio and Huron Legal serve very similar clients in terms of characteristic – large, multinational corporations within particular vertical sectors such as financial services, life sciences, pharma and technology and global presence law firms – fewer than 5% of our clients are shared between our two organizations.  So, it is a highly complementary transaction from that perspective.”

With regard to what the acquisition will mean for current clients of Huron Legal, Feinberg made it clear that there would be “first and foremost, no service interruption.  The Huron Legal management team is coming over almost in totality to Consilio and joining Consilio’s leadership team.  We don’t look at this as an acquisition, we look at this as more of a merger of two complementary businesses.  Each of our companies has certain capabilities that are stronger than the other, so the key for us is to find the strengths within each of the two businesses and leverage those into the combined entity and we expect to work with the Huron Legal management team to help build a larger, more capable entity going forward.  We also don’t want to rush this transition, we want to be very thoughtful and purposeful about it to avoid creating any kind of tension for either legacy client base, or employee base.  That said, we see considerable benefits for the clients over the mid-term and long term horizons, particularly by expanding the services for those clients who have operations around the world, particularly in continental Europe and Asia Pacific.”

Huron Legal is not Consilio’s only recent acquisition, they also acquired predictive coding provider Backstop back in September and, only days ago, acquired Proven Legal Technologies as well.  Feinberg said that a change in private equity owners was a key factor in the recent acquisitions.  “We felt that it was important to have a private equity owner that was aligned in our vision that there is going to be consolidation in the eDiscovery space.  We were very fortunate to find a partner like Shamrock Capital Advisors (who acquired controlling interest in Consilio earlier this year) who had the same strategic vision that we did.  We’ve been able to work with Shamrock to take a look at businesses that fit our business model and client base, such as Backstop, with which we’ve had great experiences.  Like Huron Legal in the US market, Proven Legal Technologies has a great bench of resources and experience in the UK market and experience in Relativity, which we had not hosted previously.  With the Huron Legal acquisition, which was somewhat coincidental in terms of timing, we were able to add a bench of even greater scale and experience with Relativity here in the US.”

Thanks, Pete, for the interview!

So, what do you think? Is consolidation within the eDiscovery industry beginning to happen more quickly? 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.

As a daily blog that has been around for over 5 years, eDiscovery Daily has published over 1,310 posts to date. We’ve covered a lot of different categories related to eDiscovery over that time.  But, do you know how to take advantage of the “Categories” feature on this blog to check them out?

We have yet to remove any posts that we’ve published from our site – as a result, we have developed quite a knowledge base resource about eDiscovery topics. Even though I’ve written most of the posts on this blog, I find myself using it from time to time, because, honestly, my brain can only retain so much.  It’s only a matter of time before I post something I’ve already posted without realizing it!  :o)

One of the useful features that our site provides is the Library section. You should see it on the left sidebar underneath the Subscription Center. There are two sub-sections that can be useful, Categories and Monthly Archives. As the name implies, Monthly Archives provides an entry for each month’s set of posts – all the way back to the launch of the blog in September 2010. It’s a great way to catch up on topics if you’ve missed them.

As for the Categories sub-section, you may have noticed at the bottom of each post under the Disclaimer, there is a “Filed under” section to show the categories that the post is filed under. Most posts relate to at least a couple of categories (for example, this one relates to Electronic Discovery and Industry Trends; not surprisingly, almost every post relates to electronic discovery because, after all, this is an eDiscovery blog).

The Categories drop down in the Library section enables you to see the classification categories that we use and select a category of interest. So, if you’re interested in viewing the posts related to eDiscovery Case Law (440 (!) of them to date, including yesterday’s post), simply select ‘Case Law’ from the drop down and the site will display a listing of post summaries, starting with the most recent post.

Do you have an interest in activities within the EDRM (198) or want to know more about Information Governance (148)? Want to know more about Federal eDiscovery Rules (82, including the rules newly adopted just last week) or State eDiscovery Rules (35)? Would you like to review cases where Sanctions (189) have been applied, or at least considered? How about articles related to Searching (281) and searching best practices?  One simple click is all it takes to get there.

Feel free to not only read each daily post, but also to use this blog as a knowledge base resource. If it’s a significant eDiscovery trend, key case law decision or best practice over the past 5+ years, we probably have it here.

So, what do you think? Are there additional categories that you’d like to see us track? 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.

We have days to celebrate all sorts of things, especially in this holiday season.  As we mentioned a couple of months ago, eDiscovery enthusiasts now have their own day – “E-Discovery Day”, which is tomorrow!

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.”

The webinar sessions have all been scheduled, the speakers have been identified and the sessions will run from 8:30am to 3:30pm PT tomorrow.  Here they are (speakers in parentheses):

• 2015 E-Discovery Case Law: Sanction Cases You Need to Know: ( Joy Conti, Chief District Judge, Western District of Pennsylvania; Gareth Evans, Esq., Co-Chair E-Discovery Practice Group, Gibson Dunn; Bob Rohlf, Esq., General Counsel, Exterro);
• A Closer Look at Social Media Discovery: (Jim Shook, Esq., Director of eDiscovery and Compliance Practice, EMC; Bill Tolson, Director of Product Marketing, Actiance);
• Taking Advantage of the New FRCP E-Discovery Amendments: (George Socha, Esq., Co-Founder, EDRM; Craig Ball, Esq., Attorney / E-Discovery Blogger, Ball in Your Court Blog; Xavier Rodriguez, District Judge, Western District of Texas);
• FRCP Changes: What, Exactly, are Reasonable Steps to Preserve ESI?: (Robert A. Cruz, Senior Director of Information Governance, Actiance, Inc., Bill Tolson, Director of Product Marketing, Actiance);
• Predictive Coding 3.0: (Ralph Losey, Esq., E-Discovery Blogger / Attorney, e-Discovery Team Blog);
• Amendments to Federal E-Discovery Rules Take Effect December 1: Are You Ready?: (Tom Shaw, Assistant General Counsel; Legal Department, CCA Facility Support Center, Nashville, Russell Taber, III, Attorney; Riley Warnock & Jacobson PLC, in Nashville);
• Make Your Job Easier with E-Discovery Technology: (David Yerich, Esq., Director of E-Discovery, UnitedHealth Group, Tom Mullane, E-Discovery Specialist, United Technology Corporation, Tara Jones, Lead Paralegal – E-Discovery and Consumer Litigation, AOL, Inc.);
• 3 E-Discovery Trends You Need to Prepare for in 2016: (Bill Tolson, Director of Product Marketing, Actiance, Catherine Casey, Popular E-Discovery Blogger; VP, Exigent Group Limited, Patrick Fuller, Director of Legal Analytics, ELM Solutions, David Houlihan, Esq., Principal Analyst, Blue Hill Research).

Looks like a great curriculum!  You can register for any of the sessions on the site here.

BTW, tomorrow is an important day from an eDiscovery standpoint in another way.  More about that tomorrow!  :o)

So, what do you think?  Do you plan to attend any of the “E-Discovery Day” sessions tomorrow?  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.