E-Discovery

Generally speaking, the presumption is that third parties will bear at least some of the costs of complying with proper subpoenas. That said, Courts often expect that a requesting party will negotiate in good faith the costs of compliance and, if those costs are significant, the requesting party would agree to cover at least some of the costs or limit its requests in light of the requirement of FRCP 45(d)(2)(B)(ii). As demonstrated by a recent case, though FRCP 45 provides two avenues for a third party to recover its costs for responding to a subpoena in federal litigation, such awards are the exception to the rule.

Even when the need to preserve mobile data is clear, for clients who are not technical experts or who do not have technical experts on staff, how to go about actually preserving that data may not be so obvious. As legal professionals, it is important that we understand how to help our clients preserve mobile data and what pitfalls they may encounter.

WINSTON-SALEM, NC (October 24, 2019) -- Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton is excited to announce that its LitSmart® AutoTasker app has been awarded the “Best Innovation: Law Firm or Corporation” at the 6th Annual Relativity Innovation Awards ceremony. The awards ceremony concluded the 10th annual Relativity Fest user conference hosted in Chicago.

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.

It takes a minute to come to terms with the definitions of "structured" and "unstructured" data. It seems logical to associate “formatting,” such as the formatting that comes with word documents (indentation, headers and footers, paragraphs, etc.) with “structure,” but the terms are used very differently when it comes to describing data. This blog will explore structured data, particularly as it pertains to the preservation, collection, processing, review and production of such data, using the Slack instant communication tool as an example.

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.