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 […]
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Who is to blame for a “document dump” – a “snow storm” – an obfuscation of information? Sometimes its intentional and sometimes it is not. Everyone – both plaintiff and defendant; both teams of lawyers. Requesters are imprecise and can be over reaching. Producers are often inflexible and unreasonable. What […]
I still remember typewriters. Heck, I still remember carbon paper, mimeographs and bag phones. Would a company, “back in the day”, have ever asked an employee, “hey, we need you to bring your own typewriter, desk, chair, or carbon paper” to work with you? Of course, not. In the recent […]
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 […]
Redaction can be a wonderful tool. It allows for the removal, or at least obscuring, of legitimately objectionable material within a document without excluding the entire document. Redaction tools might be one of the most abused, misused, and dangerous tools delivered to lawyers in sometime. Every corporate defendant in most […]
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 […]
10. Thinks a “legal hold” is a marriage license. 9. Thinks a megabyte is a sandwich served at McDonalds; a gigabyte is a double with cheese. 8. Thinks proportionality involves yearly shareholder bonuses. 7. Thinks email is not useful for discovery. 6. Thinks metadata is the most useful area of […]
In any document search allowing defendants’ custodians to conduct their own searches is much like allowing the fox to guard the henhouse. Even focused and disciplined custodial collections can be fraught with problems. Example Email sent during product development: “ Jim – I am writing to you because of the […]
How do you obtain information in a lawsuit in 2014? The practice of EDiscovery involves “electronically stored information” (ESI). Ultimately, whether the data comes in an image of the document or raw data, it will be reduced to a coalescent image such as a PDF, a TIFF, or as a […]
Today, the discovery of information in most litigation involves large amounts of digital documents and data. Corporate counsel goes through a painful hand wringing ritual every time they think about data preservation versus spoliation versus data destruction. You can hear the pain flow down from the corporate inner wards every […]