Shouldering the Burden of Data Dumping

In an ongoing employment dispute, the plaintiffs asked for discovery of selected data from two laptops, but instead received millions of digital documents, which the defense described as "everything" possibly related to the matter. The plaintiffs counsel, Charles Stillman, founder of Stillman, Friedman & Shechtman in New York, did what he could to manage this sudden influx of data, including soliciting estimates from discovery experts regarding what it would cost to comb the data.

Stillman says that the estimates he reviewed would have been prohibitively expensive for an employment matter worth less than $10 million. But he was very lucky. His clients happened to be computer experts and, using their own software, concluded that opposing counsel had not actually produced the requested files within the mountain of documents delivered. The court agreed, and sanctioned the defendant Sandisk $150,000 in Harkabi v. Sandisk Corp. "We simply could not have afforded to pay for the kind of investigation my clients were able to do for themselves," says Stillman. "They were able to build their own tool to look at the data, something that would have cost too much if we'd had to pay for it."

Stillman doesn't believe the Sandisk sanctions were the result of a deliberate strategy by the defense to obscure facts. But he says that in even a multimillion dollar case such as his, high volumes of data can quickly overwhelm any legal team. And dumping high volumes of data in discovery is a common problem in litigation, say experienced lawyers. "This is a real and growing problem, and only a few big corporate clients even have the resources to deal with this issue," says George Paul, partner at Lewis and Roca in Pheonix and co-chair of the American Bar Association's Electronic Discovery and Digital Evidence Committee. "Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, it's very easy to be overrun by data."

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Source: law.com
By: Jason Krause