Who Owns the eDiscovery Hot Seat – Corporate or Counsel?
The vast majority of our corporate clients are public corporations with inside counsel. Generally we work directly under inside counsel’s supervision to protect our work product. A fast assessment engagement for a smaller corporation without any inside counsel got me thinking about eDiscovery risk vs. cost decisions in a different light. Civil litigation is a ‘sooner or later’ fact of life for any public corporation with enough revenue to tempt a plaintiff. As eDiscovery becomes a defacto business process, what hat is the typical inside counsel wearing when they make decisions on matter scope, filters, data sources and more? We tend to think of counsel as the final arbitrators of eDiscovery decisions. But frequently, inside counsel is wearing the business hat when applying the ‘reasonable effort’ standard to situations. In a company without inside counsel, who does that final decision fall to?