Legal Updates

Sunlight Financial L.L.C. v. Hinkle, et al., 2022 WL 17487686 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 7, 2022) highlights the importance of negotiating strong stipulation orders that protect your client's interests. In this case, the Stipulated Amended Preliminary Injunction Order was overly broad and failed to carve out information that the defense believed to be the confidential, proprietary, or trade secret information of third parties. As a result, the corporate defendant was required to produce documents for forensic examination that had questionable relevance to the specific allegations of the Plaintiff and exposed the defendant to potential future litigation.

New technologies are being created and utilized every year. The most significant developments lately are the rise of chatbots - software applications that allow for online chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, without any direct contact with a human operator. Currently, the chatbot garnering the most attention is OpenAI’s ChatGPT program. This article will focus on this technology and how it works either for or against the E-Discovery review process.

An MBA professor of mine used to be fond of saying “data drives decisions.” His point was that the more information you could get, the more informed the decision you could make. In the context of document review, daily reports can be a timely and efficient method of communicating that critical information. The first few days, and even weeks, of any document review project are full of questions and uncertainty. Does the mere mention of a term make the documents responsive? How substantive does the document have to be to be considered “hot”? Am I tagging too many documents as “not responsive”? One way to gauge whether a document review is on the right track is by having the people reviewing the documents submit daily reports describing what they are seeing and how they are coding those documents.

Artificial intelligence chatter on the internet seems to be everywhere in the new year.  In January, a startup announced that an artificial intelligence-powered “robot lawyer” would represent its first defendant in court over a traffic ticket this February in California. The plan, seemingly unguided by human lawyers, came to an abrupt halt in the wake of threats from multiple state bars. But no need to plan a career change just yet – the startup announced last week it was shifting its focus from legal services to consumer rights. Until A.I. replaces us outright, the following are some interesting ways A.I. is making waves in the legal profession. 

In Part Two of this blog series, I discuss a recent case regarding noncompliance with preservation provisions in an ESI protocol and provide best practices for negotiating and drafting an ESI protocol. In Part One of this series (which you can find here), I analyzed how courts have resolved ESI protocol disputes with TAR and metadata provisions.

“We are family.” If you are like many people, you can’t read those words without singing them. Unlike the joyous refrains of Sister Sledge, however, the idea of family may take on a more ominous tone when viewed in the context of familial corporate relationships and the obligation to preserve and/or produce electronically-stored documents or information in litigation. In today’s digital world, related corporate entities may share email servers or electronic databases or jointly engage agents to process or store their electronic data. The use of shared administrative or other departments may further cause the commingling of access to various corporate electronic data repositories. As technical advancements increase and further ease the flow of data between related companies, the question arises what discovery obligations a company may have to preserve or produce its affiliate’s electronic data in litigation to which the related entity is not a party.