In Hamlet, his mother the queen is quoted as saying, “The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.” In Shakespeare’s time the word “protest” was meant as the lady vows or declares solemnly, too much. So do the devotees of predictive coding, protest too much. A recent article in favor […]

The short answer is, it depends. Like it or not, we live in an age of “1’s and 0’s” and this digitization has made the creation of documents easier and the storage of those same documents easier and cheaper. I remember during the paper days trying to find space to […]

In the case relating to the Biomet Hip Implant Litigation (In Re Biomet M2a Magnum Hip Implant ProductsLiability Litigation). The case involves over 19 million documents and is a great example for why plaintiffs must get involved early in document discovery. The defendants applied a combination of keyword searches and […]

Federal Rules were last updated in 2016 and the changes were thought to be significant. Welcomed by some and scorned by others, those changes are still being evaluated and applied by judges across the country. The Sedona Conference has drafted a primer for FRCP 34. Like revisions to the federal […]

The Sedona Conference has a slogan: “Moving the law forward in a reasoned and just way”. That slogan is exactly the way I have described this impressive organization and what do. The Sedona Conference regularly drafts and disseminates commentary articles on various areas of the law and the practice of litigation. I […]

The party receiving discovery requests in litigation has the job of trying to understand the locations of potentially responsive data and documents; determining the identity of key custodians; and determining the most efficient and cost effective method for collection. The requesting party has as complicated job. For discovery requests to […]

What is the “Daubert” standard supposed to test? Daubert v Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 US 579 (1993). Daubert and the Federal Rule of Evidence 702 are intended to allow the court to act as a gatekeeper in keeping “junk science” away from jurors. The theory, I suppose, is that jurors […]

If you ask an opposing party about the details of their document collection; the custodians interviewed; the keywords searched; or the culling approaches used; you are likely to get one response, a quickly erected brick wall. In Cooperation and Litigation: Thoughts on the American Experience (2013), Richard Marcus writes: “I […]

I attended LegalTech   2015 this year in New York. It was a great seminar and another well done project by ALM. One wrinkle, though. Lawyers, vendors and even judges continue to want to shove predictive coding down everyone’s throat. Not “technology assisted review (TAR)”, but specifically predictive coding. With the […]

Two disturbing cases for different, but similar reasons. When did parties jump from collection and culling of documents to simply turning over all possible evidence blindly and relying on a claw back agreement to protect the producing party? Putting aside that works entirely in favor of the receiving party, this […]