These days, attorneys say that e-discovery can eat up between 50 to 80 percent of a litigation budget, a staggering cost that threatens to overshadow the merits of litigation and compound the tensions between bar and bench.
And as the cost of e-discovery keeps growing, so, too, grows the number of problems created by these growing costs, and the possible solutions to these problems. There's also no shortage of disagreements on those problems and solutions:
• Some say recent amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were a help, others say they don't go far enough.
• Some say the courts need to catch up with the times and get more involved in e-discovery disputes from the get-go, while others say it will simply take time for case law to develop.
• Defense lawyers say plaintiffs use discovery as a bargaining chip to elicit settlements from large companies with lots of data. Plaintiffs lawyers say the justice system has long provided for open discovery.
What everyone seems to agree upon is that electronic discovery continues to be the tail that wags the dog in many cases, that these issues will only become more prevalent, that e-discovery is now a strategic aspect of litigation and that every litigator should have some degree of knowledge on the subject -- or at least know who to turn to when they don't know something.
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Source: Pittsburgh Post Gazette
By: Gina Passerella
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