In-House Counsel

All the posts here I collected, preserved, reviewed and produced about electronic discovery

By Rees Morrison

Dark matter accounts for the bulk of the universe, we can?t see it, don?t understand it and it pushes the universe to expand faster and faster. So too with e-discovery.

These days, the ether is filled with almost hysterical talk about the costs of e-discovery (See my posts of Aug. 5, 2005: ?70-80 percent of litigation spending goes to discovery?; Aug. 24, 2005: spending controls crash into electronic discovery costs; Oct. 1, 2005: e-liminating e-discovery expenses; April 12, 2006: calculating Total Cost of Electronic Discovery; and Jan. 6, 2006: urban legend on costs for on e-mail discovery.).

Hundreds of vendors have poured into the space (See my posts of March 4, 2007: e-discovery consolidation: Merrill buys LextraNet; May 13, 2007: RR Donnelley gets involved; June 18, 2007: document review: the next e-discovery; Oct. 21, 2005: Attenex?s proportionality framework for e-discovery; and Oct. 29, 2007: electronic-evidence data-discovery vendors.).

The vendors promote all kinds of technology for e-discovery (See my posts of May 3, 2007: technology to optimize document review; May 7, 2006: semantic network mapping; and Feb. 6, 2007: litigation hold orders.).

To help law departments cope with e-discovery, several organizations have sprung up (See my posts of Feb. 14, 2007: Corporate E-Discovery Forum; Feb. 18, 2007: Corporate Forum and Sedona Conference; Jan. 28, 2008: Women in E-Discovery; and Jan. 27, 2008: Association of Litigation Support Professionals.).

Everywhere you look, large law departments have set up internal discovery teams (See my posts of Feb. 25, 2007: Pfizer; March 23, 2007: Verizon; Feb. 1, 2006: Altria; Jan. 16, 2007: roles important for any internal e-discovery team; and Nov. 24, 2005: Cisco?s in-house litigation document infrastructure.).

Other aspects of e-discovery appear among this blog?s posts (See my posts of Jan. 30, 2006: hire former employees for tasks that support litigation (Purdue Pharma); and Oct. 8, 2007: An in-house guide to e-discovery practices and resources.).

Full post as published by Law Department Management on July 26, 2008 (boomark / email).