November 17, 2006 – Electronic Discovery Law

New E-Discovery Rules & The Attorney-Client Privilege: A Middle Ground for Waiver?

Nov 17 2006

A November 2006 article by Preston Gates partner Julie Anne Halter for the Washington Legal Foundation:

"The proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure will go into effect on December 1, 2006, absent some affirmative act by Congress to prevent their adoption. Among the amendments are provisions designed to address the everapparent problem faced by corporate litigants: the volume of electronically stored information and the varying ways it is maintained make it very difficult and often cost-prohibitive to efficiently and effectively review it for privileged material prior to production. Under the current legal framework, the inadvertent production of privileged or work-product protected material creates substantial risk; at the same time, the effort and cost to conduct a comprehensive pre-production privilege review often make such review impractical."

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Citing The Sedona Conference Glossary for E-Discovery, Court Overrules Vagueness and Ambiguity Objections to Request for Production

Nov 17 2006

Johnson v. Kraft Foods N. Am., Inc., 2006 WL 3302684 (D. Kan. Nov. 14, 2006)

In this decision, the court granted in part plaintiffs’ motion to compel and overruled a number of defendants’ objections to plaintiffs’ request for production. Among other things, defendants had objected that many of the terms used in the request were vague and ambiguous, including: “electronic databases,” “personnel related data,” “database,” “coded fields,” and “data dictionaries.” Overruling the objection, the court noted that plaintiffs had attempted to resolve any ambiguity by providing definitions in a separate letter. It also noted that, while the court’s electronic discovery guidelines did not specifically provide definitions for the terms in dispute by the parties, the guidelines did provide a valuable reference to the Sedona Conference® for definitions of terms used in the guidelines. It concluded:
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Archive - November 17, 2006