The criteria that you prepare for the review will be governed by the objectives that you established for the review. At a minimum, you’ll draft criteria for responsive documents. In addition, you may draft criteria for privileged documents, hot documents, and so on. Let’s start with drafting responsive criteria.
read moreIn it’s almost six years of existence, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) Project has implemented a number of mechanisms to standardize the practice of eDiscovery. Having worked on the EDRM Metrics project for the past four years, I have seen some of those mechanisms implemented firsthand. One of the most significant recent accomplishments by EDRM is the EDRM Data Set.
read moreRecently, I assisted a large corporate client where there were several searches conducted across the company’s enterprise-wide document management systems (DMS) for ESI potentially responsive to the litigation. Some of the individual searches on these systems retrieved over 200,000 files by themselves!! That’s where proximity searching comes in.
read moreIn theory, responsive documents are described in the other side’s request for production. In practice, those requests are often open to interpretation. Your goal in drafting responsive criteria is to distill those requests and create a clear set of objective rules that leave little room for interpretation – a set of rules that can be applied correctly and consistently to the document collection.
read moreOnce you’ve defined the objectives of the review, you need to move forward with other preparation steps: You need to draft review criteria, you need to identify the type of people that are appropriate for the review, and you need to pull that team together. Before moving forward with these steps, you need a bit more information. You need to know what’s in the document collection.
read moreRecently, this blog cited a Duke Law Journal study that indicated that eDiscovery sanctions were at an all-time high through 2009. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a story recently from Williams Mullen providing a very thorough recap of 2010 including trends in sanctions (identifying several cases where sanctions were at issue), advances made during the year in cooperation and proportionality, challenges associated with privacy concerns in foreign jurisdictions and trends in litigation dealing with social media. One noteworthy finding is that, according to the report, sanctions were sought and awarded in fewer cases in 2010.
read moreSo, how did you do? Did you know all the answers from Friday’s post – without “googling” them? 😉 Here are the answers – enjoy!
read moreDatabases: You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. Or so it seems in eDiscovery. On a regular basis, I’ve seen various articles and discussions related to discovery of databases and other structured data and I remain very surprised how few legal teams understand database discovery and know how to handle it. But, maybe you already know all you need to know about databases? Here is a brief “pop” quiz on database concepts. See how many you can answer!
read moreYesterday, we introduced the blog series to discuss Managing an eDiscovery Contract Review Team. Now, it’s time to get started! The first step in preparing for a document review is to very clearly define the objectives of the review. It’s an easy step, but it’s very important. It will drive several subsequent decisions that you’ll make regarding management of the project.
read moreIn a perfect world, attorneys responsible for a case would review an entire document collection for responsive materials. On large cases with huge collections, that’s just not practical or possible. In those situations, your only choice may be to pull together a team of contract reviewers to identify responsive materials.
read more