At the end of the two part blogging, when you are presented with these questions, my hope is that this post will help you to speak intelligently on the subject and make an informed decision about how you should proceed.

Let’s start with the basics; a document family can be created in multiple ways:

The justices must now decide whether to adopt these amendments. The following questions reflected concerns about e-discovery and a hope that the proposed rules will help trial court judges and lawyers.

Judge Peck is in the best position to determine when and if an evidentiary hearing is required and the exercise of his discretion is not contrary to law. Judge Peck has ruled that if the predictive coding software is flawed or if Plaintiffs are not receiving the types of documents that should be produced, the parties are allowed to reconsider their methods and raise their concerns with the Magistrate Judge.

A few weeks ago, Maureen Holland issued an impassioned report from the trenches about the all-too-common practice of lawyers using their Outlook accounts to review client e-mails. Not surprisingly, there are important reasons why this practice does not comport with Fed. R.Civ.P. 34.

To set the stage, here’s a short quiz.

Sedona, Arizona is a special town. Harmony, convergence, tranquility are all attributes one associates with this place. The scenery, energy and people make this the perfect place to meet and discuss the future of eDiscovery.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of heading down to my local Apple Store for a Genius Bar appointment to deal with my non-functioning iPhone. While sitting there, I overheard one of the resident “Geniuses” discussing restoration of an old damaged iPhone to a newer one via iCloud. The long and short of it is that this “Genius” instructed the owner of the two iPhones to turn on iCloud, allow the old damaged phone to back up to iCloud, and then use the backup of the old phone to transfer all of his data to the new phone through a restore.

Determining whether a review method is defensible (or, for that matter, any other action you take in your case), is, and has always been, a function of organization, iteration, sampling and documentation. However, as lawyers and e-discovery experts work to develop strong methods and clear documentation around TAR , there has been a lingering worry that something in that black box is going to blow up and damage your case.

As far along as we are in the eDiscovery field in many ways, the Outlook “workflow” just described is one of many situations I have seen, in which lawyers try to take matters into their own hands with potentially disastrous results. In this situation we stepped in and did what needed to be done and the client is in a much better place because of it.

Maureen articulated three fundamental points about the need to keep eDiscovery simple: First, apply the same principles for small batches of ESI that you would for large amounts of data. Second, don’t get distracted by the technologies that are bombarding us at warp speed. Third, continuously vet your practices and workflows against emerging case law and agreed-upon best practices.

I recently received a request from a client to run key terms on a hard drive image and export the “hits”. Sounds easy enough, however, they also wanted to export the “hits” from slack, deleted, and unallocated space. To complicate matters this was a court ordered search and the directions from the Court included searching deleted space and exporting the “hits”. Again, may sound easy, but this is when I think to myself that the judge and lawyers were probably not conferring with a forensic or eDiscovery expert when this order was drafted.