Posts Tagged ‘ESI’

With the rise of corporate litigation, eDiscovery requirements are taxing already overextended corporate legal department budgets.  To relieve this budget pressure, corporate legal departments are looking for ways to become more efficient in the eDiscovery process including ESI collection, early case assessment (ECA) and review.

Attend this live webcast to learn how you can employ a proactive eDiscovery strategy to help you significantly reduce your overall litigation preparedness budget while maintaining or exceeding your legal department service levels.

“A recent proposal will mandate the current and future governors of New York to use an email archiving solution that will offer permanent access to important documents, the Times Union reports.

The most recent proposal marks the second-consecutive year New York lawmakers have passed legislation that creates more strict regulations forcing governors to submit emails to state archives. The bill’s proponents have stressed the historical benefits of integrating a government email archiving solution.

I just got back from the ILTA show in Las Vegas. I had booth duty most of the time so have little opportunity to scout the show but had several interesting conversations with attendees as they came into the Iron Mountain booth.

In the case of Arteria Prop. Pty Ltd. v. Universal Funding V.T.O., Inc., 2008 WL 4513696 (D.N.J. Oct. 1, 2008) the court made an interesting statement in reference to how website content should be treated in litigation:

The legal hold requirement is vastly misunderstood in my opinion. I have run into many corporate counsels that have the opinion;”I just send and email out to anyone in my company that could have responsive ESI asking them to be sure not to delete any data about the following subjects”. Then, if the delete something they shouldn’t have, it’s their neck, not mine or the company’s.

Many (but not all) corporate legal types consider ESI retention management as the legal hold process. Not a bad thought but really falls short of a true corporate definition of the term. To records managers ESI retention management refers to the systematic retention and disposition of the organizations electronic business records; either for the day to day running of the business, regulatory compliance or litigation support. And in this case I believe the records managers are right.

The law firm of Gibson Dunn has just published their mid-year Electronic Discovery and Information Law Update and pointed out some interesting trends. The report can be viewed here.

From the Gibson Dunn report:

Of the 103 opinions Gibson Dunn analyzed, litigants sought sanctions in 30% (or 31)–compared to 42% in all of 2009–and received sanctions in 68% of those cases (or 21)–compared to 70% in all of 2009.

Ok, I know there is a push back from the legal industry in reference to the problem of the cost of discovery. Yes, companies create, use, receive and delete huge amounts of electronic information on a daily basis and it is unreasonable to expect an organization to have enough of a handle on this moving target to be able to place an effective legal hold – quickly, and provide all responsive information in response to an eDiscovery request. But come on… organizations live and die by their information, especially electronic information and if an organization doesn’t have enough of a handle on their data to be able to place a legal hold on select data, then I’m sorry they have other problems.

In the recent case; Jones v. Bremen High School Dist. 228, 2010 WL 2106640 (N.D. Ill. May 25, 2010), one of the discovery points made in the decision was what is the appropriate legal hold process to meet an organization’s legal hold responsibilities.

From an article at litigationsupporttoday.com

The days when an attorney had to touch every document in a collection are gone. The volume of data in a typical case is simply too vast for such an outdated approach. Instead, forward-thinking organizations perform non-substantive reviews – those conducted for purely defensive purposes such as privilege, relevance, and responsiveness determinations—using automated technologies.