The e-discovery scales of justice are consistently tugged between ever-expanding forms of data on one hand and improving technology and know-how to manage that data on the other.
The question becomes how to bridge a gap that keeps getting wider and is compounded by the tension between the bench and bar's interest in broad discovery and a desperation to quell staggering e-discovery costs that threaten to overshadow the merits of litigation.
Attorneys have said e-discovery can eat up between 50 to 80 percent of a litigation budget. Even on the low end, that verges on the minnow that ate the whale.
There is no shortage of disagreements on both the problems and the possible solutions regarding e-discovery.
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 to 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.
To Continue Reading: Click Here
----------------------------------------------
Source: law.com
By: Gina Passerella
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment