KMK Law Complex Litigation Blog

In our increasingly technological society, parties are encountering a greater demand for electronically stored information (“ESI”) in litigation. This demand has led to the adoption of a concept called proportionality. Proportionality evaluates the costs and benefits of e-discovery, to determine if discovery production is warranted.

In a case featuring a heated pretrial-discovery battle between heavyweights, a U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge in Tennessee recently approved the use of predictive coding in reviewing over two million documents for responsiveness.  

In today’s increasingly data-driven world, compliance with discovery requirements can mean production of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, if not millions. Federal Rule of Evidence 502(d) was enacted to reduce the costs and risks associated with discovery, and to allow a federal court to protect the privilege of documents that have been inadvertently disclosed. Federal Rule of Evidence 502(d) provides that “a federal court may order that the privilege or protection is not waived by disclosure connected with the litigation pending before the court – in which event the disclosure is also not a waiver in any other federal or state proceeding.”

Two  federal courts recently dealt with thorny issues stemming from defendant employers’ use of the attorney-client privilege and work product doctrine. These rulings should be heeded by those of us who develop or revise electronic data review protocols, particularly any  guidance for determining when to withhold documents under the attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine.

A quick glance at  Dictionary.com reveals the following definitions for the word ‘vendor’ vs. the word ‘partner’:

vendor:
-noun
1.        a person or agency that sells.

partner:
-noun
1.        a person who shares or is associated with another in some action or endeavor; sharer; associate.

How do you and your organization view your relationship with your external e-discovery service provider(s), as those of a vendor, or those of a partner?  Frequently razzed about my overt avoidance of the word ‘vendor’ when seeking e-discovery RFP project consultations and bids at the onset of a new litigation matter, the word ‘vendor’ still never fails to leave a sour taste in my mouth. 

On May 26^th, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled that, under the Stored Communications Act of 1986, postings to a user’s Facebook “wall” (and, similarly, to the “comments” page on MySpace – although nobody actually uses MySpace anymore) are considered private so long as the user has his privacy settings set such that only “friends” can see his wall postings.