E-Discovery Burden, the Judges’ Guide, and an Alternative to AFAs

In light of a new E-Discovery guide distributed to judges, lawyers should address their ESI processes to avoid losing credibility.

For years judges have relied heavily on the counsel appearing before them to learn how electronically stored information (ESI) had to be processed for review and production. Of course, at times the lawyers for the producing parties had more interest in arguing how burdensome and oppressive the production requests were than in enlightening the court about cost-effectiveness; at other times counsel may have had only limited experience with new technology.
The eDiscovery Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research organization, has just released a publication for judges that provides a detailed, vendor-neutral look at technologies and processes that can greatly reduce the cost of handling ESI, the “Judges’ Guide to Cost-Effective E-Discovery,” by Anne Kershaw and myself, with a foreword by the Hon. James C. Francis IV, Magistrate Judge for the Southern District of New York.

Used in combination, those technologies can cut ESI costs by 90 percent or more, a fact that seems particularly relevant given that ESI review costs can be the largest single budget item for litigation.

Among the technologies and processes covered in the Guide are:

• deNISTing (i.e. not processing files known to be associated with commercial software, such as help files, user documentation, templates, etc., as compiled by the National Institute of Standards and Technology)

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Source: insidecounsel.com
By: Joe Howie