Discovery Resources

by Dennis Kiker, Esq., Director, Fios Consulting, Fios, Inc.

On September 8, 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 2450 without amendments, which adds Rule 502 to the Federal Rules of Evidence. The bill was approved by the Senate way back in February (who says Congress doesn’t act quickly?), and President Bush has officially signed Rule 502.

So what? Well, this is actually pretty good news for corporate litigants, assuming that they understand the rule and are properly prepared. Unlike the changes to Rule 26(b) implemented as part of the e-discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the addition of Rule 502 is acontinue…

by Dennis Kiker, Esq., Fios Consulting, Fios, Inc.

If you look around my office, you’d have to conclude that it is. Though most of my stuff is on the computer, I still seem to wind up with lots of paper on my desk – in part because some things are just easier to read or manage in paper. (Think about those 20 minutes between the time the cabin door closes and the plane reaches 10,000 feet. What would I do without paper?) So, for me, paper is often pretty useful.

In the litigation context, however, that might not be true. In one of his most recent decisions, Judge Waxse ofcontinue…

By Prashant Dubey and Mary Mack, Esq.

In the United States home ownership is almost equivalent to freedom of speech, equality and the pursuit of happiness. The fact is that most people who “own” a home own only a small piece of it; the rest is financed through mortgages. And some of them have proven to be quite risky and costly for the economy.

Subprime loans and other adjustable-rate mortgages, which are made to higher-risk borrowers with lower income or shakier credit histories than prime borrowers (at higher interest rates to compensate for increased credit risks), came with hidden surprises and hidden costs. And as the housing bubble began tocontinue…

By Conrad J. Jacoby, Esq

Preservation is the foundation for effective management of discovery materials—hardcopy and electronic alike.  After all, documents that are not preserved cannot be examined for potential relevance.  Courts routinely punish parties that have failed to preserve potentially relevant evidence—even though, as a statistical matter, it’s overwhelmingly likely that documents within an organization are supportive of the producing party’s position and not the “smoking guns” requesting counsel dreams of finding. 

Statistics, of course, only speak to trends across larger data populations.  Litigation is full of disputes in which a producing party was able to identify—and destroy—key documents while leaving other materials intact.  For example, the older casecontinue…

by Conrad J. Jacoby, Esq.

e-Discovery is not a natural disaster, but in some ways, it has more than a little bit in common with some of the flooding we recently experienced in the American Midwest. Floods are deceptive in appearance. From a distance, floodwaters’ calm surface looks uneventful and even serene. It’s only when you see treetops and house roofs peeking up that you are reminded of the underwater debris and destruction that resulted from the relentless push of water against everything standing in its path.

Electronic discovery, too, can look deceptively simple from a distance. In a courtroom, a judge’s order for a party to produce its relevantcontinue…

By Belinda Runkle, Fios, Inc.

Remember storage systems back in the 90′s, when storage vendors were promising how SAN, NAS and other monolithic storage devices where going to cure the IT world of all their storage and data management ills? Hard drives were just so darn expensive and data was proliferating at an alarming rate. What was an IT administrator to do, keep adding file servers every week? The storage industry sprinted to provide bigger, better, faster solutions all geared towards getting all of our files into one glorious place, where it would be forever hosted by redundant disks, controllers, nics, power supplies, you name it. Every possible point ofcontinue…

Interview with Mary Mack, Esq., Corporate Technology Counsel at Fios, Inc.

1. What was the dispute between Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 127 S. Ct. 1955 about?

William Twombly sued Bell Atlantic for violating Section One of the Sherman Antitrust Act, found in 15 U.S.C. § 1. The class action complaint was made by Twombly on behalf of all individuals who purchased local telephone or high speed internet services within the United States, following the breakup of AT&T. The plaintiffs alleged that the country’s major providers of local telephone service had conspired not to compete with each other in their legacy markets and to prevent competitive entrycontinue…

The Legal and Economic Implications of Electronic Discovery; Options for Future Research

By: James N. Dertouzos, Nicholas M. Pace, Robert H. Anderson

From The Rand Corporation website:

Pretrial discovery — the exchange of relevant information between litigants — is central to the American civil legal process. As computer technologies continue to develop, concerns have arisen that, because of the sheer volume of electronically stored information, requests for electronic discovery can increase litigation costs, impose new risks on lawyers and their clients, and alter expectations about likely court outcomes. For example, concerns about e-discovery may cause businesses to alter the ways in which they track and store information, or they may

continue…

By Conrad J. Jacoby, Esq.

Miscommunication is a constant problem within the field of electronic discovery. Legal practitioners, e-discovery service bureaus and corporate IT staff each have distinct and long-standing professional vocabularies that use different terms to describe similar information repositories and data management procedures.

In its latest annual 2008 Litigation Trends Survey, the international law firm Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P. predict a rise in corporate litigation.  “This year’s survey appears to mark an inflection point for American business, between the end of a prolonged period of prosperity and the start of a period of economic challenge that is likely to fuel litigation over who is to blame and who should pay for the consequences,” said Stephen C. Dillard, who chairs Fulbright’s global litigation practice. “Given that we were polling in-house counsel on the cusp of that transition, it’s no wonder that this year’s findings highlight both thecontinue…