E-Discovery Best Practices

This Quarterly Spotlight focuses on Virginia Duke Ring, a Senior E-Discovery Attorney on Kilpatrick's LitSmart E-Discovery Team. Virginia joined the LitSmart team in January 2018 after previously practicing with the Firm's insurance recovery group. Virginia has proven herself to be a strong leader. She promotes collaboration among team members and is the consummate "team player." Scott O'Neal was fortunate to learn more about what makes Virginia such a valuable team member.

One of the greatest fears in any litigation matter is that you will somehow accidentally produce work product or attorney-client privileged documents to the opposing side and waive the privilege. As a result, it has become standard protocol for parties to enter into clawback agreements that protect sensitive electronically stored information (ESI). Clawback agreements allow parties to agree that the inadvertent production of privileged information will not automatically waive the privilege and provide a process for the return or destruction of that privileged material.

There is often a lot of discussion around the processing and review of documents in a litigation, most likely because these phases end up costing the most money and taking the most time. What is often overlooked, however, is the collection process and how that phase sets the tone for the rest of discovery, including overall case strategy, knowledge gathering and cost thresholds for the case. In this blog, I lay out some best practices that can be followed to collect data in a sound manner while keeping costs reasonable and gathering all relevant information. 

This is Part Three of a continuing series on ESI basics. In this series, we cover some of the terms used most often on the tech-side of e-discovery. In Part One, we provided an overview of PSTs. You can find that article here. In Part Two, we provided a primer on data processing. You can find that article here.  Whether this is an introduction to you or a refresher, and whether you are an attorney, member of an in-house team or data analyst, this information may come in handy in your practice.

Last year, in In re Broiler Chicken Antitrust Litigation, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois laid out a very detailed protocol for conducting TAR that can serve as a go-by for parties wishing to conduct TAR in their own litigation. If you are considering implementing TAR in your next review, you may want to take a look at this. 

This blog is part one of several regarding how to effectively and efficiently manage electronic discovery in large, complex litigation. It is in these types of matters that special attention to electronic discovery is crucial to the client’s overall success. We begin here with the earliest stages: data identification and preservation.