E-Discovery Duties and the Range of Sanctions for Failures to Comply with Them
Mondaq Business Briefing › United States Law Articles in English (2010)
Linked as:
Extract
E-Discovery Duties and the Range of Sanctions for Failures to Comply with Them
Why is it that every litigator must become conversant with the language and intricacies of electronically stored information (ESI)? And why is it that they should feel highly motivated to do so in a non-negligent manner? This article addresses these questions.
Attorneys know, of course, that the discovery of potentially relevant evidence is a standard part of every lawsuit. But what is new is that, within the last five years, it has been recognized that ESI comprises most of all potentially relevant evidence. It has been noted that even the smallest fender-benders can involve ESI; for example, if the driver was texting just before the crash. In such a case, the amount of ESI might be relatively small, but then again, the existence and timing of the texting might be critical. In anti-trust, securities, fraud, mass tort or employment class actions, and in trade secret and patent cases, the amount of ESI is different and can, in fact, be prodigious. Indeed, the hallmark of ESI is its immense volume. The larger cases can involve terabytes of ESI. For context, a megabyte is about 75 pages; a gigabyte is about 75,000 pages, if printed.1 A terabyte is a thousand times more than a gigabyte, which means 75 million pages, which is 25,000 boxes, and that's the equivalent of about 50,000 trees. Why is there so much of it? The answer is simple. In 2003, researchers at UC Berkeley published an update to their study, How Much Information? The...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
