Litigation

California: We May Be Broke, But We've Joined the Twenty-First Century

By Bruce Nye

    As I posted here two and one half years ago, despite California's status as the home of Silicon Valley, the birthplace of Google, Amazon.com, Intel, Yahoo, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, McAfee, Intuit, Symantic and scores of other companies that used silicon and ones and zeroes to change the way we work, play, practice law, etc., California has had no statutes, no rules, and scarcely any case law addressing issues of electronic discovery.

    Late last year (as discussed here), the legislature finally passed an e-discovery act.  But at the time, the Governator and the legislature were at each others throats over the then projected $28 billion state budget deficit, Ahnuld was vetoing every non-budget bill that crossed his desk, and what was then AB 926 landed on the scrap heap.

    Well, as luck would have it, California now has a budget gap of more than $26 billion for one year, the treasury is paying its bills (and tax refunds) with IOUs, and the current donnybrook  between legislature and governor makes last December's squabble look trivial by comparison.  But while the governor is still talking about vetoing all non-budget related legislation, he did manage to take a moment away from the budget smack-down to sign AB 5, which is essentially the same as the act he vetoed last year.  The new act adds Code of Civil Procedure section 1985.8 specifically dealing with subpoenas of electronically stored data, adds a variety of related provisions throughout the Discovery Act, and addresses issues of reasonable accessibility and the format(s) in which electronically stored data shall be produced.  The entire act, which takes effect immediately,  is here.

Full post as published by CalBizLit on July 06, 2009 (boomark / email).