Knotty Issues of eDiscovery
Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal is one of the new heroes of eDiscovery jurisprudence. In Venture Corp. Ltd. v. Barrett, the good Judge opened with the following on Rule 34: Most lawyers (and hopefully judges) would be forgiven if they could not recite on demand some of the more obscure of[…]
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Thanksgiving time is one for reflection. I have been thinking about Judge John Facciola’s impact on the world of eDiscovery with his upcoming retirement. I am very thankful we had such a dedicated judge who has been such a leader in electronic discovery. Judge Facciola had his share big cases,[…]
Read moreMagistrate Judge Paul Cherry is a great jurist whose opinions on the form of production should be taught in first year Civil Procedure classes. The Judge clearly explains the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and applies the rules to the case at bar in very concise analysis. A Plaintiff in a[…]
Read moreNot all native files are in a “reasonably useable form.” To borrow from the Dark Knight, sometimes, producing native files as PDF’s with metadata is the “reasonably useable” form you deserve, but not the one you need for convenient document review. A Plaintiff sought a native file production from a[…]
Read moreTaxation of cost cases can get funky. One such example is where a party sought costs for discovery to be produced in “OCR” format. The Court went on to state: “The scanning and conversion of native files to the agreed-upon format for production of ESI constitutes ‘making copies of materials’[…]
Read moreIt is dangerous for lawyers to argue information was not searched for years because of “human error.” That is right up there with saying, “Your Honor, we goofed. Are we cool?” As we learned from Judge Kevin Fox, no, we are not cool. The case involved claims for wrongful termination and[…]
Read moreMany litigation support professionals think Excel files are the bane of discovery. Attorneys with a fixation of wanting a Bates Stamp on electronically stored information demand Excel files be converted from their native application to a static image, causing one Excel file to explode into a 500 page PDF. To[…]
Read moreWhat happens when a lawyer inadvertently produces an email protected by the attorney-client privilege? A Magistrate Judges and District Court Judge orders the receiving party to destroy the inadvertently produced email. Iowa is the home of where John Atanasoff invented the first computer in 1939. It is also the home of[…]
Read moreA Pro Se Plaintiff in a prison inmate case requested the Court order the Defendants not to destroy any relevant video surveillance footage from a specific date. The Court declined, because the Defendant was already subject to the duty to preserve. Ross v. Conner, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 146887, at *17-18. The[…]
Read moreNo vacation should end with people becoming Plaintiffs. Sadly, that happened on a trip to Hawaii when someone had a slip and fall in a hotel garage after exiting an elevator. Riley v. Marriott Int’l, Inc., 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 135728 (W.D.N.Y.Sept. 25, 2014). The Defendant hotel maintained both video[…]
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