-
Electronic Discovery Shines a Bright Light on Defendant Misconduct
Our blog frequently writes about preservation of evidence and how corporate defendants are getting into hot water when their litigation hold policies fall short. As more corporations move to full electronic data over paper documentation, it will become harder to hide, destroy or fail to produce relevant evidence. This is
-
Second Circuit Takes Two Steps Back to Enforce Duty to Preserve Evidence
The standardization of eDiscovery protocols and better computer forensics is giving a boost in modern litigation to plaintiffs seeking to uncover the truth. Electronic data is difficult to hide or destroy, as it almost always leaves trace artifacts and trails. This was evident in the Zubulake series of cases where
-
Defendant’s “Document Dump” Leads to Waiver of Attorney-Client Privilege
Defendants often employ an old, tired tactic to overwhelm plaintiffs’ counsel in response to discovery requests: Bury them in paperwork! However, litigants may want to rethink this strategy, as the use of a “document dump” for electronically stored information (ESI) can lead to inadvertent disclosure of privileged information. In the
-
Avoiding the Crossfire: The Lessons of Zubulake V
“When communication between counsel and client breaks down, conversation becomes “just crossfire,” and there are usually casualties.” Zubulake V, 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13574 (S.D.N.Y. July 20, 2004). Zubulake V picks up where the last order left off, being that the Court found the defendants had breached their duty to
-
Plaintiff ESI Production Strategies are Necessary from the Beginning of the Case
The 2012 Virginia court opinion Global Aerospace, Inc., et al. v. Landow Aviation, L.P. d/b/a Dulles Jet Center, et al., (Case No. CL 61040) was no small discovery case. The physical amount of the ESI data was over 200 gigabytes (GB), or the equivalent of about two million pages if
-
Do Plaintiffs Have the Right to Choose eDiscovery Production Methods?
More cases are coming down across the nation dealing with eDiscovery review methods, and a common theme has been to order computer-assisted document review (aka “predictive coding”) to make document review more efficient. Sometimes, this is beneficial for plaintiffs, such as our discussion of the National Day Laborer Organization, where
-
Go Fish! The Inadequacy of Mere Keyword Searches in Electronic Discovery
The plaintiffs in National Day Laborer Organizing Network, et al. v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, et al., 2012 U.S. Dist. Lexis 97863 (SDNY, July 13, 2012) were legal advocacy groups who sought documents pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from multiple government agencies regarding an immigration