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 […]

Florida is sunny and a great place to live or work; but we can be a little slow to except new things. Florida Rules of Civil Procedure were amended a couple of years ago to include at least the mention of electronic discovery. Sadly, the changes did not treat ESI […]

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 […]

The discovery of electronically stored information (ESI) is loaded with potential pitfalls and failure unless the parties add two components to the mix: cooperation and collaboration. Lacking those components, ESI discovery, at least sometimes, can be one of the more painful experiences for the average trial lawyer. The problem to […]

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 […]

As we have discussed before, the federal Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure have been entertaining comments on new rule revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Over 600 comments to the proposed revisions have been filed so far; many by lawyers who generally represent plaintiffs. Why largely […]

Many attorneys approach handling electronic discovery in exactly the same way they have handled paper discovery in the past. The Rules of Civil Procedure in Florida apply the same to paper and digital as far as discoverability and other issues, the mechanics of production have changed and lawyers must pay […]

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 […]