By Correy Stephenson
The Daily Record Newswire
While the sheer amount of electronically stored information continues to grow, the cases in which it appears are sometimes small.
For lawyers seeking solutions for dealing with electronic discovery in cases without terabytes of data, the American Bar Association Law Practice Management Section has published Electronic Discovery for Small Cases: Managing Digital Evidence and ESI.
Co-authored by Bruce A. Olson, president of ONLAW Trial Technologies in Appleton, Wis., and Tom O’Connor, a Puget Sound, Wash.-based consultant and speaker in the area of computerized litigation support systems, the book offers practical suggestions for attorneys looking to perform their own collection, review and production of ESI on a small scale.
The book first provides an overview of the history of e-discovery, from changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to seminal cases, including Zubulake, Qualcomm and Pension Committee. Turning to “the small case dilemma,” the authors provide tips and tools for attorneys who choose to handle e-discovery on their own.
The process can be relatively simple and inexpensive if metadata is not an issue; however, even if metadata is included in the discovery, self-collection is still an option, according to the authors.
For example, products like SafeCopy 2 and Harvester will help lawyers gather data and preserve metadata during the collection process.
For searching data, the book suggests dtSearch Desktop, which costs just $199 per license and allows users to search and view a mixed collection of raw data and email files.
For processing, review and production of smaller document collections (in the range of 500,000 documents or less), the authors recommend Digital WarRoom Pro.
One chapter walks readers through the use of the program, starting with installation. It then explains the entire process of using the product, from using a tool that provides a graphic of the number of email contacts one individual had with another individual to coding items for privilege, responsiveness and production.
The book also addresses handling large volumes of email and attachments, a common scenario that arises in cases of all sizes, and recommends using a software program called Intella.
For cases where email is the only form of ESI being produced, most attorneys already have a tool at their disposal, the authors note: Adobe Acrobat.
A portfolio can be created out of an email folder in Outlook or Lotus Notes which is searchable and can be filtered by fields like date, sender or recipient. The portfolio can then be copied and produced to the parties.
Finally, the authors turn to the production of ESI in a small case.
They recommend dtSearch Publish, a software program that will produce the ESI on a CD, DVD or external hard drive that is immediately usable and does not require specialized litigation software or IT support — a valuable option in small cases where opposing counsel may be doing things on his or her own as well.
While noting concerns about security, ownership of client data and confidentiality, the authors argue that the future of e-discovery can be found in the cloud.
Monthly storage fees have come down in recent years and the service is scalable to a lawyer or law firm’s needs.
The book discusses two options: Lexbe Online and Nextpoint’s Discovery Cloud and Trial Cloud, which focus on the discovery and trial phases of litigation, respectively.
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