Data Collection Best Practices

The emergence of ephemeral messaging applications to communicate with friends, family, and coworkers quickly, securely, and effortlessly has boomed over the past decade. In that time, users of ephemeral messaging apps have risen significantly, from millions to billions of active users! Ephemeral messaging is an integral and evolving part of both individual and company communications with advantages and challenges impacting companies and the legal industry. Companies must consider the ramifications of their employees' use of ephemeral messaging and adopt policies and procedures to best protect themselves and comply with requirements relating to litigation and regulation. Courts have already begun addressing the failure to preserve relevant ephemeral messages and have been issuing sanctions in a myriad of legal challenges. Ephemeral messaging is here to stay, and companies, courts, and attorneys must understand and adapt to evolve with this emerging technology.

While requests for email communications and collections from hard drives and networks are standard in today’s litigation, a party’s text messages, and collections from mobile devices are oftentimes overlooked. A narrowly tailored motion to compel forensic exam can be a valuable discovery tool to analyze the data on a party’s mobile phone. This blog analyzes the factors that led a court in the Northern District of Illinois to order the forensic imaging and collection of a party's mobile phone.

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.