Catagory:Market Announcements

The rules of civil procedure are once again being amended, this time to update them for document production in the digital age. Judge Shira A. Scheindlin talks about what the proposed changes will mean for in-house counsel. She also gives advice and her top ten tips on conducting e-discovery in the current murky shadow of Rule 26, to avoid garnering sanctions for inadvertently violating a discovery order, or worse yet charges of spoliation of evidence. [Subscription to the ACC Docket required.]

BusinessWeek Online, December 20, 2004

Tort reform is a hot topic again. Taking advantage of the most favorable political climate in years, business lobbyists are pushing for new federal laws that would mop up the asbestos mess, cap medical malpractice damages, and help companies steer class actions out of hostile state courts.

But there’s another legal reform campaign that has attracted much less attention — yet could be more significant than any of these measures. It is Corporate America’s effort to get the Judicial Conference of the U.S. (JCU), the obscure group that makes the rules governing lawsuits, to enact special new procedures for electronic evidence. This broad category of digital information includes spreadsheets, databases, memos, letters, PowerPoint presentations — and most important, the e-mail messages that have recently plagued so many companies in court. Read the entire article at BusinessWeek Online.

By Tricia Bishop, The Baltimore Sun
December 27, 2004

Brian L. Moffet said he saw the writing on the wall about three years ago. The attorney was arguing a national class- action suit with 50,000 pieces of paper entered into evidence when the judge asked, “Where are the e-mails?”

That sent Moffet into scramble mode.

“It was the first time I realized it was something that was going to have to be addressed,” recalled the lawyer with Gordon, Feinblatt, Rothman, Hoffberger & Hollander of Baltimore.

Read the entire article posted on latimes.com. [Subscription required.]

E-discovery gurus George Socha and Dennis Kennedy discuss their simplified 8-step approach to effective discovery of electronic information [assessment, project management, forensics, conversion and storage, records management, search, integrating discovery into daily operations and trial prep] in this November 2004 Discovery Resources post.

The Recorder
December 6, 2004

Litigants who demand expensive electronic data discovery have to pay for it, the Sixth District Court of Appeal ruled Friday. Noting that the issue is “bound to arise with increasing frequency,” the appellate court reversed a trial court decision that had compelled Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. to produce data at an estimated cost of $1.5 million to $1.9 million. Click here to continue reading [subscription required.]

Article by Thomas F. Gleason and Patrick M. Connors published on Lexis Nexis Practice Area News
Let’s skip the obvious and unanswerable question — why anybody could believe there was joy in litigation in the first place — and ask what prompts this now common sentiment. Is there truly an explosion of electronic evidence, creating mind-numbing discovery and inspection sessions and costs threatening to swamp the financial viability of commercial litigation? The answer, in these writers’ opinions is yes, and the basic problem is the amount of “stuff” that computers create. Read more.

By KATE KELLY
The Wall Street Journal
October 27, 2004, 10:09 AM EDT

One of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s investigators was perusing a stack of subpoenaed documents in a Manhattan office last month when he let out a yelp, slammed down his coffee and sprinted down the corridor.

The find, people in the office recall: a Marsh & McLennan Cos. employee’s e-mail soliciting a fake bid from an insurance company to help Marsh steer business to a favored provider.

The sleuth: Craig Winters, a 27-year-old intern. Read More

Oct. 14, 2004
By Greg Morcroft
CBS.MarketWatch.com

NEW YORK (CBS.MW) — Eliot Spitzer clearly doesn’t follow the edict of Henry Stimson, a 20th century U.S diplomat, who once famously stated, “Gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail.”

Spitzer, New York’s current attorney general and the bane of corporate wrongdoers, launched his latest salvo Thursday at several of the nation’s largest insurance companies, using internal e-mails from several of the companies to buttress his case. Read More

Preston Gates attorney Martha Dawson and Senior Attorney for Microsoft Gregory McCurdy co-authored an article published in the June/July 2004 issue of The National Law Journal. Titled “Are Instant Messages Discoverable?,” the article explores the questions raised by business use of instant messaging (IM).