Modern Attachments

Have you ever given much thought to what constitutes a “family” of documents when producing electronically stored information (“ESI”)?  Even if you are an E-discovery attorney, you very well may not have. After all, it is pretty straight forward, isn’t it?  An email and all its attachments are a document family. Sometimes, you have a document with embedded files or images that may be split off into separate documents in the collection or processing process. That document and its embedded files are a document family. And . . . that’s pretty much it, right?  Well, not so fast. As cloud storage and collaboratively shared documents become more popular, we are seeing increasing numbers of emails that have hyperlinks to documents rather than conventional attachments.  So, are hyperlinked documents part of a family?  How are the courts handling these issues?

Document management systems allow users to send a link to a document directly from the system, ensuring that all recipients receive the same, most up to date version, and, often most importantly when it comes to efficiency, ensuring that only one person is working in a draft document at a time. When we email links to these documents, the document itself is not attached to the email; rather, a hyperlink to the document where it is housed on the document management system is attached. As an e-discovery professional, my next thought is….how do we handle these links in discovery? At least one court has grappled with this question and its decision sheds new light on how we can handle hyperlinked attachments in our own cases.