States Adoption of the FRCP
Thomas Allman recently publish an article titled: State E-Discovery Rulemaking after the 2006 Federal Amendments: An Update. In it Tom points out that 23 states have adopted statewide e-discovery procedural rules which mirror or reflect the 2006 E-Discovery Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
Why is this fact noteworthy? It means that in those other 27 states, there is little or no guidance when it come to expected e-Discovery expectations or procedures. As an organization in possible civil litigation, you are more at the mercy of the Judge and his e-discovery expectations.
So how, as an organization, do you put policies and procedures in place to better meet your obligations in state civil litigation?
I think one best practice most would agree on is more effective records management practices to insure the proper management and timely disposition of ESI. Discovery responsibilities, in most cases, assumes that a defendant is not purposely deleting data so it can’t be used against them at trial and second, they can find ESI reasonably quickly when asked.
One defense against a lack of e-discovery rules in those 27 states is to adopt records management practices that are defensible and also make sense from a business point of view.
Tags: civil litigation, discovery, e-discovery, eDiscovery, ESI, FRCP, records management, states
