Federal Judicial Center Releases Preliminary Results of “Case-Based Civil Rules Survey”

The Federal Judicial Center has released the preliminary results of its Case-Based Civil Rules Survey.  The survey, as described in the Executive Summary “presents preliminary findings form a survey of attorneys in recently closed civil cases…The report covers discovery activities and case management in the closed cases; electronic discovery activity in the closed cases; attorney evaluations of discovery in the closed cases; the costs of litigation and discovery; and attorney attitudes towards specific reform proposals, and, more generally, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.”

Included in the section addressing electronic discovery were results indicating that issues related to the discovery of electronically stored information (“ESI”) were discussed in more than 30 percent of planning conferences, that the most common issues discussed were the “parties’ routine practices regarding retention of ESI and the format of production,” and that “approximately 50 percent of parties eventually producing ESI instituted a litigation ‘freeze.’”

A copy of the full report is available here.