Blogs & Resources

On September 29, 2016 the Florida Supreme Court amended rules 4-1.1 and 6-10.3 to the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar. As a result, Florida attorneys will now be required to obtain 3 credit hours of CLE in approved technology programs. Further, language was added to the Comment to Rule 4.1.1 Competence, which reads as follows:

Competent representation may also involve the association or retention of a non-lawyer advisor of established technological competence in the field in question. Competent representation also involves safeguarding confidential information relating to the representation, including, but not limited to, electronic transmissions and communications.

What does this mean for litigators dealing with electronic evidence? I like to say that the realm of eDiscovery is a melding of legal and IT, two groups of professionals who speak different languages, and who under typical circumstances do not care to speak the language of the other. We have all heard that attorneys speak legalese, and we know of the “IT speak” that flies over the heads of IT industry outsiders. How can we manage the additional eDiscovery industry terminology that is a necessary part of the conversations between IT and legal that surround litigation or a government investigation? At the time of my entry into the field of eDiscovery in 2013, I had not even heard of the term metadata, much less jargon like DeNIST, TIFFing, load file, and so on.

What do you do when you are hit with litigation or a government investigation where you have hundreds of gigabytes, potentially meaning hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, and a short timeline for production? There are numerous technology-assisted ways to deal with large amounts of data, some of which include early cases assessment (ECA) tools, simple culling, and advanced analytics. Even with all of the technology available, large cases will likely require some form of manual review, but there are limited resources available that explain how to approach such a task. As such, what follows here is a step by step guide for how to manage human review, including both managing the human aspect of review and some basic technical considerations to take into account along the way. This should serve as a starting point for someone new to managing the process or who needs ideas for improving their large scale document review.

Spoliation of relevant Electronically Stored Information (ESI) is a serious concern for litigants in both Federal and State court actions. Because of records retention measures that may be in place at an organization, such as automatic deletion of emails after a certain time period has elapsed, and because of litigants’ potential ignorance of their duty to preserve, it is prudent to seek avenues to ensure that both your own client and the opposing party are proactively preserving ESI from the onset of their duty to preserve.