Knotty Issues of eDiscovery
Magistrate 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[…]
Read moreRosemary Woods was not involved in this document production. In motion practice over the adequacy of a production, the Plaintiffs were able to show that the Producing Party did not produce 18 email messages that were produced by a third-party. As such, the Plaintiff sought production of search efficiency reports[…]
Read moreI prepared a guest post for Everlaw’s blog on an attorney’s ethical duty to follow a client’s instruction to manually review documents prior to production. Is expert testimony required to show a lawyer breached their standard of care or is this issue one a jury can decide on their own?[…]
Read more