The Nebulous Nature of eDiscovery

http://ow.ly/aYgxG


An article by Linda Sharp, Esq., MBA posted on the Modern Archivist blog.

This article discusses the case of Bradley B. Larsen vs. Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corp (C.D. Ca. Feb. 2, 2012), and looks at the question of what constitutes a "reasonable" eDiscovery request.

The article states that a plaintiff's request for a 2nd round of eDiscovery production, based on allegations of the defendant's failure to comply with the first series of eDiscovery requests, was not supported by enough evidence from the plaintiff which showed a lack of compliance by the defendant.

The article states, "Judge Goldman, citing the Sedona Conference Principles, deemed that the plaintiff must show that the defendant’s steps to preserve and produce relevant ESI were inadequate for a second round of production to be ordered. The plaintiff was unable to show enough facts to lead to this second round. Due to this lack of evidence, Judge Goldman dismissed the request.

Judge Goldman deemed that the collection of ESI performed by the defendant, which included over one-thousand man hours of processing, collecting, and reviewing ESI (costing in excess of $100,000), to be sufficient. This process produced nine-thousand pages of information of which the plaintiff could only cite two examples of information that might be missing."

The article goes on to mention that the court relies on "proportionality tests", but that it is still not an exact science as to what is a sufficient response to request for production.