Posts Tagged ‘litigation’

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.

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:

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.

Time and time again we see news stories and legal case writes ups where it has become obvious employees still have no idea that an email is not a private communication. I find most employees, even corporate legal department types, still consider an email is like a verbal conversation in a parking lot; once its ended, it doesn’t exist anymore (unless it was recorded).

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.

Reuters had an interesting article on social media policies on June 28 at:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKLNE65R01920100628

The article pointed out that trying to stop employees from participating in the social media revolution is near impossible and is not the right strategy in any case. The article advocated giving employees some ground rules (via written policy) about what can be written and to always use a “professional” conduct.

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.

Over the last two years, the trend has been to bring some or all of the eDiscovery process in-house, mainly to save money…large amounts of money. This movement to bring eDiscovery in-house has risks associated with it, the risk of not fully being able to effectively meet all the process requirements i.e. not finding/recognizing all ESI that could be responsive or privileged. Many organizations have tried to bring eDiscovery in-house by relying on their current infrastructure solutions.