ESI Agreement

There are few things more dreaded in discovery than the time-consuming, tedious, onerous, beastly privilege log – especially in complex litigation matters involving thousands of pages of documents. These logs, however, are a critical component of the E-Discovery process that requires careful attention to detail in planning, analysis, and preparation. In this blog post, we will explain what a privilege log is, discuss the various types of privilege logs, recommend pre-privilege review strategies, and address post-submission concerns.

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.

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.