February 9, 2012 – Electronic Discovery Law

Must Parent and Attachment Files Be Kept Together?

Feb 09 2012

Thomas J. Smith and Matthew S. Collins, K&L Gates
The Legal Intelligencer, February 9, 2012

The extraordinary cost of e-discovery is well documented. The amount of ESI that we generate is exploding and the use and prevalence of technology, its ease of access, and the relatively low cost mean that trend will continue. Clients are becoming increasingly sensitive to and concerned about these increasing costs, and the ongoing economic malaise has only exacerbated the problem and hastened clients’ efforts to control such costs. In doing so, parties are looking beyond macro controls such as the number of custodians, the nature of collections (full v. targeted), and filtering techniques (date limitations, keyword terms), and now look at micro controls, including the parsing of document families at a component level. A key question, therefore, becomes: If one part of a multi-component document is relevant, should all nonprivileged parts of that document also be produced?

To read the entire article, click here.

On Appeal, KPMG Ordered to Continue Preservation of more than 2500 Hard Drives

Feb 09 2012

Pippins v. KPMG LLP, —F.R.D.—, 2012 WL 370321 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 3, 2012)

In this opinion, the District Court found the Magistrate Judge’s order requiring defendant’s preservation of more than 2500 hard drives was not clearly erroneous or contrary to law. Finding objections to the order moot, however, because plaintiffs’ motion for conditional certification of a nationwide class was granted, the court denied defendant’s motion for a protective order and ordered preservation of the hard drives until the parties could agree on a sampling methodology, until defendant abandoned a particular litigation position, or until members of each relevant class were established.

Archive - February 9, 2012