David Lender is Co-chair of the firm's 160-lawyer Complex Commercial Litigation practice and a member of the firm's 15-person Management Committee. Over the past several years, he has successfully tried numerous cases in both federal and state courts.
Editor: Are your corporate counsel clients concerned about litigation costs?
Lender: They all are. Litigation costs are a major concern, especially given what's going on in the economy. Corporations have imposed significant budget constraints that have hit legal budgets as well. E-discovery is in many cases the most significant cost in litigation. It can easily eat as much as 50 percent of a company's litigation budget.
The concern about e-discovery costs is compounded by the fact that those costs are frequently incurred under circumstances where clients feel they did nothing wrong, yet they face multiple millions of dollars of potential discovery costs.
Editor: Do these increases in e-discovery costs result from notice pleading?
Lender: The problem stems from the fact that discovery is still very much open-ended. Some judges are trying to rein it in, but there is still a mindset among many lawyers that a party is entitled to and should discover everything that is relevant or possibly could lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. Notice pleading exacerbates the problem. If notice pleading is all that is required, a savvy plaintiffs' lawyer can, in most cases, craft a complaint that can survive a motion to dismiss, and then you're off to the races with e-discovery and the associated costs.
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Source: Metropolitan Corporate Counsel
By: David Lender
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