Discovery Resources

This article from the New York Lawyer tackles one of the primary questions facing Legal Departments today: How to cut costs in the most effective ways to improve their bottom line. “Cost-control methods in law departments are more than just talk as cost pressures are creating a fundamental shift in the management and operation of the departments and their interaction with outside counsel, results of a recent Hildebrandt International survey suggest.

Results of the Law Department Survey are a further indication that more work is being brought in-house, alternative fee arrangements are in high demand and spending is shrinking. The rate of increase for inside and outside legal spend andcontinue…

Law.com brings us this take on email disaster: “On April 22, 2007, Bear Stearns hedge fund manager Matthew Tannin sent an e-mail to fellow hedge fund manager Ralph Cioffi. “The entire subprime market is toast,” he said. “There is simply no way for us to make money — ever.” Three days after the now-infamous “toast” e-mail, Tannin reassured investors during a conference call, telling them he was “very comfortable with exactly where we are” and “there’s no basis for thinking this is one big disaster.” Continue reading….

This article, written by Nuix CEO Eddie Sheehy, discusses his ideas about how to improve eDiscovery solutions the most efficient, cost-effect ways.

In these strained economic times, there is intense pressure on the eDiscovery process to improve operational performance, while processing increasingly large amounts of data faster, with less labor and lower costs and overhead, while also maintaining top-notch accuracy. Looking forward, there are a variety of logical improvements to eDiscovery technologies that need to be achieved to address market demands in the most effective, cost-efficient way.

1. eDiscovery technologies must improve processing speed to allow users to provide “answers” back to stakeholders rapidly, providing them an immediate strategic overviewcontinue…

Two watchdog groups want answers on how millions of Bush-era messages vanished — and they’re losing patience with the White House. Mother Jones reports ” An old problem is back in Barack Obama’s inbox: What to do about millions of missing Bush-era emails?

In March, two Washington watchdog groups agreed to suspend a lawsuit against the White House — a case the Obama administration inherited from its predecessor — that aimed to force the government to recover the emails and modernize its archiving of electronic documents. At the time, the Obama administration had indicated it was willing to work toward a settlement. Continue reading….

Legal Holds & Trigger Events, is a blog dedicated to cases, insights, developments and best practices relating to the development and implementation of legal holds relating to audit, investigation and litigation in the United States; and trigger events that give rise to the duty to preserve evidence in the United States.

Today they review a report of In Shukla v. Sharma (EDNY Aug. 21, 2009),in which a Hindu Priest, claimed that the Ashram he lived and worked for in New York illegally trafficked him into the US in 2000 and enslaved him.

The primary discussion of the Report is a summary judgment motion by defendants, but a spoliation motion alsocontinue…

Shocking news (not) from The National Law Journal: “The economy has employers extra jittery about company secrets getting out, so nervous that they’re hiring staff just to monitor outbound e-mails.” Continue reading….

From Newsfactor.com’s Data Storage page: “Before the advent of electronic discovery, a grandfather, father, son backup tape rotation policy was probably a good idea. Tapes were an inexpensive means of insurance against the inadvertent deletion of data. Electronic discovery has driven the cost of that insurance into the stratosphere. What can organizations do to address the problem?”  Continue reading….

From the CIO.com’s IT Drilldown: “According to IDC, in 2008 the total amount of information created exceeded the total amount of usable space on every hard drive, tape, CD, DVD and solid state memory device ever created. At the same time, there’s been an explosion of legal obligations for data, largely driven by expanded e-discovery requirements and the revisions to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.”  Continue reading….

What does vanish really mean for computer systems at our universities? From the New York Times: “In less than two months after a group of University of Washington computer researchers proposed a novel system for making electronic messages “disappear” after a certain period of time, a rival group of researchers based at the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, has claimed to have undermined the scheme.”
Continue reading….

This month, Bullseye brings you an article by Robert Ambrogi which points out the best of the worst — 10 of the most outrageous examples of people caught in the courtroom by what they did on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere online. Remember, what happens in Vegas, doesn’t necessarily stay there. Continue reading….