Patent Law

Sedona Discovery Cooperation Proclamation

By Les Weinstein, Michael Young, John Leo Wagner, Eric van Ginkel, and Victoria Pynchon

Thanks to the recent Twitter entry of R. David Donoghue -- "follow" him here -- of the Chicago IP Litigation Blog, we here at the IP ADR Blog can bring you the Sedona Discovery Cooperation Proclamation.

  Since I'm in Paris and David promises to post a piece on this in his blog tomorrow, I'll leave the commentary to him.  Here's the 3-page manifesto and below the introduction.

(left, Donoghue, standing up for reason and client-satisfaction).

The costs associated with adversarial conduct in pre-trial discovery have become a serious burden to the American judicial system. This burden rises significantly in discovery of electronically stored information (“ESI”). In addition to rising monetary costs, courts have seen escalating motion practice, overreaching, obstruction, and extensive, but unproductive discovery disputes – in some cases precluding adjudication on the merits altogether – when parties treat the discovery process in an adversarial manner. Neither law nor logic compels these outcomes.

With this Proclamation, The Sedona Conference® launches a national drive to promote open and forthright information sharing, dialogue (internal and external), training, and the development of practical tools to facilitate cooperative, collaborative, transparent discovery. This Proclamation challenges the bar to achieve these goals and refocus litigation toward the substantive resolution of legal disputes.

Full post as published by IP ADR Blog on October 07, 2008 (boomark / email).