Legal Updates

  • Privilege
    Legal Updates

    Risks of Waiving Privilege for Third Party Litigants When Producing Documents to the Government

    Waiver of privilege and particularly inadvertent waiver of privilege is always a concern in e-discovery when producing documents to an outside party. Not only may your current litigation be affected but waiver may also affect your client’s future litigations and other litigation teams that had no involvement with your production. This is a particularly serious concern when producing documents to the government, given the power dynamics involved.

  • Masks
    Legal Updates

    Life After COVID 19: E-Discovery Considerations for Attorneys and Clients

    Life around the world has significantly changed in the last three months. From job losses, homeschooling, and working from home, daily life is not the same as it was in February. The world of E-Discovery has not been immune. Law firms and service providers have been forced to adapt to a quickly changing environment. From an E-Discovery perspective, the use of these remote working tools creates new data sources for preservation and collection. Diligent attorneys and clients would be wise to consider and discuss how these tools might impact the phases of E-Discovery moving forward.

  • Technology Competence
    Legal Updates

    What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You: Technology Competence in the Time of COVID-19

    Last fall, I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the 2019 Relativity Fest entitled “Why Lawyers SHOULD Be Luddites.” It was a lively discussion about whether lawyers should be luddites, whether robots would be taking attorney jobs, should attorneys learn to code, and how to future-proof yourself. Opinions were split but what struck me the most was that a majority - if not all – of the attendees wanted to learn how to future-proof themselves. In this blog I offer tips on how to take advantage of technologies to do just that.

  • Shifting Costs
    Legal Updates

    Shifting Costs for Responding to Subpoenas Under FRCP 45

    Generally speaking, the presumption is that third parties will bear at least some of the costs of complying with proper subpoenas. That said, Courts often expect that a requesting party will negotiate in good faith the costs of compliance and, if those costs are significant, the requesting party would agree to cover at least some of the costs or limit its requests in light of the requirement of FRCP 45(d)(2)(B)(ii). As demonstrated by a recent case, though FRCP 45 provides two avenues for a third party to recover its costs for responding to a subpoena in federal litigation, such awards are the exception to the rule.

  • 3 Tips for Managing the Preservation of Mobile Device Data
    Legal Updates

    3 Tips for Managing the Preservation of Mobile Device Data

    Even when the need to preserve mobile data is clear, for clients who are not technical experts or who do not have technical experts on staff, how to go about actually preserving that data may not be so obvious. As legal professionals, it is important that we understand how to help our clients preserve mobile data and what pitfalls they may encounter.

  • Fingerprint
    Legal Updates

    Just Because We Can, Doesn’t Always Mean We Should

    We depend on and indeed praise technology for the myriad ways it makes discovery more efficient and less costly than ever before. Such reverence, however, raises the question:  is there a point where the use of technology becomes too much? Can we become so enamored with the technological resources at our disposal that we neglect to use basic common sense and risk waiving certain basic rights? According to the North Carolina Court of Appeals, the answer is a resounding "Yes."