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The litigation community must reconsider traditional search and retrieval techniques, or we will face either a nation without justice or a profession full of document reviewers. Traditional approaches to discovery now lead counsel away from the path toward a just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of the law, and away from the mandate that discovery responses be both reasonable and proportional to the controversy they surround.
In litigation in the US, the parties are obligated to produce to one another, when requested, those documents that are potentially relevant to issues and facts of the litigation (called “discovery”). As the volume of electronic documents continues to grow, the expense of dealing with this obligation threatens to surpass the amounts at issue and the time to identify these relevant documents can delay a case for months or years.The same holds true for government investigations and third-parties served with subpoenas. As a result, litigants are looking for ways to reduce the time and expense of discovery. One approach is to supplant or reduce the traditional means of having people, usually attorneys, read each document, with automated procedures that use information retrieval and machine categorization to identify the relevant documents. This study compared an original categorization, obtained as part of a response to a Department of Justice Request and produced by having one or more of 225 attorneys review each document with automated categorization systems provided by two legal service providers.The goal was to determine whether the automated systems could categorize documents at least as well as human reviewers could, thereby saving time and expense. The results support the idea that machine categorization is no less accurate at identifying relevant/responsive documents than employing a team of reviewers. Based on these results, it would appear that using machine categorization can be a reasonable substitute for human review.
Deduping is a litigation cost control technique that could be applied to virtually all litigation regardless of the litigation support or document review platform used by the law firms or corporate counsel.
In May 2009, Anne Kershaw and Joe Howie conducted a survey of leading e-discovery providers to determine what their practices were regarding deduping e-discovery or ESI, specifically regarding deduping only within the records of individual custodians (sometimes called “vertical” deduping) compared to deduping across the records of multiple custodians (sometimes called “horizontal” or project-level deduping).
In September/October of 2009, Anne Kershaw and Joe Howie surveyed leading providers of electronic discovery software and services to determine what their experience had been with using email threading technology as a way of providing cost-effective e-discovery review. This report provides the results of the responses.
Inside Counsel Magazine Partners with EDI to host Corporate Litigation eDiscovery Roundtable.
The discovery of electronically stored information (“ESI”) has become vital in most civil litigation—virtually all business information and much private information can be found only in ESI. At the same time, the costs of gathering, reviewing, and producing ESI have reached staggering proportions. This is caused in good part by the sheer volume of ESI but also by the eluctance or inability of some lawyers to adopt cost-effective strategies. This guide provides an overview of some of the basic processes and technologies that can reduce the costs of processing ESI. Courts may not want to adopt all of the recommendations contained here, but they are worth careful consideration. For judges who are inclined to be involved directly in managing ESI issues, this guide provides information that can be shared with counsel to help curtail ever-escalating discovery costs.
For judges who are more comfortable letting the parties manage the details of e-discovery, it will help separate fact from myth or fiction when lawyers advance conflicting arguments on electronic discovery. At the very least, lawyers for all the parties should be encouraged to be familiar with the principles contained in this guide.
EDI Co-founder Patrick Oot authors cover story article in Law Technology News discussing the privacy issues around cloud computing. A link to the article can be found by clicking here.
This article summarizes EDI predictive coding survey and examines inconsistency of linear review.
Report provides full details of survey on use of predictive coding in pre-production review of ESI.
The article explores the ethical implications of failing to consolidate duplicate electronic files and touches on ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.1 (Competence), 1.3 (Diligence), 1.5 (Fees), 1.6 (Confidential information, 3.2 (Expediting Litigation), 3.3 (Candor Toward the Tribunal), and 4.1 (Truthfulness in Statements to Others). The sidebars include a sample letter to outside counsel and an ediscovery competence quiz with answers.
This article details savings and benefits of email threading technology and provides list of threading features to look for.
This article considers ethical implications of Kershaw-Howie Deduping Report.
