Common sense, law school and practical experience all tell a litigator that interviewing a custodian is the best way to identify potential ESI. This made sense when the evidence was in the filing cabinet, but not when it is scattered over network shares and other systems.
Mohawk Industries v. Carpenter is Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s first opinion and while it first appears to be a simple procedural issue, it may have far reaching consequences with counsel making risk vs. cost decisions around their discovery efforts. The case involves a dispute over whether privilege waiver and other discovery related district court orders can be appealed during or after the case, whether it qualifies for an interlocutory appeal in lawyer speak. The unanimous opinion found that with some exceptions discovery decisions could only be appealed after the final judgment was rendered.
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-01-26 12:24:21Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. 2009 has been a hard year for corporations of every size. The wave of high publicity eDiscovery sanctions in 2007-2008 had General Counsel’s focusing on reducing discovery risk before the economic down turn. Now they are tasked with cutting departmental budgets and the ever-growing cost of discovery. So [...]
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-01-26 12:26:52Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. The eDiscovery buzz word these days is ‘ECA’ or Early Case Assessment. But what does that really mean and what software functionality really comprises an ‘ECA solution’? The current Wikipedia definition of ECA appears to focus purely on scanning and generating reports on sources of unstructured ESI [...]
As legal technology migrates from external service providers to inside the firewall, it is more important than ever to test and understand your rates of collection, processing, loading, reviewing and producing ESI. Litigation support is a deadline driven business. Counsel will wait as long as possible before pulling the trigger on discovery in the hope and expectation of resolving the matter without having to incur further costs. Successfully adapting to this pressure cooker lifestyle requires that you construct a ‘burst capacity’ workflow as opposed to a normal ‘continuous capacity’ model.
The final result was an initial list of 543 sites that met my fairly strict requirements. That means that almost 95% of sites were only vaguely related to our industry or practice. No wonder webinars, conferences and training organizations are getting decent attendance. If you do not already know what you are looking for, your odds of finding it are pretty slim or you are in for a lot of surfing.
“What positive impact?” you ask. It seems that when times get tough, good companies get busy and the others go out of business. Every booth that I visited trotted out new features, licensing options and a better overall understanding of the customer’s needs. The economic pressure cooker seems to have sounded the wake up call to service and technology providers alike. What impressed me the most was that everyone was able to express a consistent value proposition message. Many still have technology flaws and poor usability, but they are becoming aware of the user’s context and can present their offerings within some kind of usage scenario.
Barry Murphy called out 2010 as “the year of ECA”. Certainly those three letters were found on almost every booth, even if the exhibitors did not exactly agree on what that entails. The majority of the processing players seem to consider canned reports and inventory functionality to provide ECA support. But the important trend is that everyone is looking to provide upstream decision support.
This year I tried an experiment in my continual quest to gather as much information from the Discovery Maze (LNTY Exhibit Halls) as possible. The experiment was a bust, but there were lessons in why and how it failed. The idea was to recruit corporate and firm managers and specialists with 5+ years experience to be ‘Secret Shoppers’ on the Exhibit Hall. This way I could try to reach more of the floor and everyone in the network would share their feedback on a set of secured web pages.
Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2010-02-16 04:00:27Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. As corporate legal departments struggle to control costs, they are often shocked at the lack of transparency and standardization in eDiscovery software and service purchasing. Public corporations have long since created structured procurement processes managed by IT departments and business units. Because the legal service industry evolved [...]