How to Look Like a Rube in Three Easy Steps

Josh Gilliland and his always-entertaining “Bow Tie Law’s Blog” turn this week to the case of In re NetBank, Inc., 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 69031 (N.D. Ga. Aug. 7, 2009), in which the producing party went to great lengths to prove to opposing counsel and the court that they knew absolutely NOTHING about e-Discovery.

The Defendants [...]

Clowns To The Left Of Me, Partners To The Right

Wendy Akbar of Quarles & Brady blogs about how e-discovery practice is turning the traditional partner-associate dynamic on its ear.  The wizened (and aged) partners end up being rank newbies where e-discovery is concerned, while the baby associates tend to have a much greater grasp of the technology behind the ESI.  (The analogy of associates [...]

Why ALL Search Methods Stink

Yep, my headline for this post is pretty strongly-worded … but it’s also pretty accurate.  The fact is, sanction-happy judges and vague, utopian court rules regarding ESI searches don’t mix, when you’re dealing with mounds of mostly-random electronic data.

Don’t take my word for it.  Eric P. Mandel writes to the EDD Update blog about the [...]

DE Chancery: Their Spoliation May Be Your Fault

From the National Law Journal, Sheri Qualters reports on the Delaware Court of Chancery’s recent spate of decisions regarding several aspects of e-discovery practice.  Most significant to me is Beard Research Inc. v. Kates, in which plaintiffs were granted an adverse inference instruction for missing computer evidence.  The key language:

If the parties do not focus [...]

Developing ESI Search Processes Without Getting Hosed

Craig Ball absolutely nails it with his new column in Law Technology News regarding an approach to keyword search. Craig’s take on how attorneys currently fail to make the grade in crafting keyword searches, and how to implement an effective methodology for querying, echoes my own strategy for not only building effective search queries, but [...]

Keyword Searching Is Pretty Good After All

From Jason Krause on Law.com comes this article regarding the Text Retrieval Conference Legal Track 2008.  The main points to take from this article are that, properly used, Boolean keyword searching is equally as effective as more “advanced” search technologies such as clustering and concept searching. 

However, as the article points out, Judge Peck (in Gross Construction v. [...]