E-Discovery

  • Social Network
    Technology Advantage

    Collection Best Practices - How Multifaceted Software Has Changed E-Discovery

    As our work force has shifted to mobile and remote working practices (a trend in place before COVID, which only accelerated during the pandemic), businesses have turned to collaborative messaging tools such as Slack and various versions of Teams to manage communications. On the positive side, by using these messaging tools, organizations are able to more efficiently discuss ideas and brainstorm solutions. However, when an organization becomes involved in a dispute and those communications are potentially relevant to the dispute and need to be preserved and collected, the process may not be as straightforward as a simple email collection.

  • Justice
    Legal Updates

    Court Orders Spoliation Sanctions Requiring Defendants and Former Defense Counsel To Pay Attorneys’ Fees and Costs

    In DR Distributors LLC v. 21 Century Smoking, Inc, v. CB Distributors, Inc. and Carlos Bengos, 2021 WL 185082, No. 12 CV 50324 (1/19/2021), Judge Johnston of the Northern District of Illinois, granted Plaintiff’s motion for sanctions against Defendants and their former counsel, requiring them to, among other things, pay what was expected to exceed a million dollars of attorneys’ fees and costs to Plaintiff. The Court imposed the sanctions based on its conclusion that Defendants and their former counsel: did not take reasonable steps to preserve ESI (electronically stored information); did not conduct a reasonable investigation of their ESI; did not timely disclose ESI under 26(g); and spoliated thousands of emails and chat messages. This ruling shows that we, as legal practitioners, need to be extremely congizant of our discovery obligations.

  • COVID
    Technology Advantage

    COVID-19 and E-Discovery- How Things Are Changing

    COVID-19 has changed the world we live in. People are working from home, students are attending classes online, and all group events are handled remotely. For those of us who work in the E-Discovery field things have changed also. While we are facing new challenges, we are also finding interesting new opportunities to conduct our work more efficiently, and everything we are learning will inform our work even after the pandemic is over. 

  • Jim Hefferan
    LitSmart News

    Quarterly Spotlight On..... Senior E-Discovery Attorney Jim Hefferan

    I had the recent opportunity to sit down (virtually) with Senior E-Discovery Attorney Jim Hefferan and find out more about his extremely interesting background and life. Considering his role as a member of the City Council for his town of Belmont, NC, I also thought he might have a unique perspective on how COVID-19 has changed our lives.

  • 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.