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Loose Clicks Sink Ships Posted By Daniel Kaiser, Esq. on August 31, 2009
Need Another Reason to Review your Information Management System? You don’t think so? Here’s one anyway provided on June 4, 2009 by the U.S. Court of Appeals (8th Cir.): American Boat Company, Inc. v. Unknown Sunken Barge. This case really should be subtitled “Are You Being Served?” – although it sadly lacks in ironic humor or the English accents.
In February a towboat company called American Boat lost one of its towboats, to the tune of $3 Million in damages, in a collision with a hidden submerged barge on the lower Mississippi River. American Boat brought an action against the United States alleging negligence for failure to maintain a navigable channel. Facing a district court summary judgment for the U.S., counsel for American Boat filed a Motion to Amend Judgment or in the Alternative for Reconsideration.Read more
You may know what you’re looking for, but do you know how to look? For those who are engaged in eDiscovery, two cases touching on search methodologies that have held our attention over the past year include Magistrate Judge John Facciola’s decision in U.S. v. O’Keefe, and Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm’s decision in Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe, Inc.. Facciola’s harangue regarding the complex nature of ESI searches may have assured his immortality, and it is too good to resist quoting yet again:
Whether search terms or ‘keywords’ will yield the information sought is a complicated question involving the interplay, at least, of the sciences of computer technology, statistics and linguistics... Given this complexity, for lawyers and judges to dare opine that a certain search term or terms would be more likely to produce information than the terms that were used is truly to go where angels fear to tread.Read more
Lately I've heard quite a few people in the eDiscovery industry throw around the word commodity when discussing processing.
Which begs the question, is eDiscovery processing really a commodity? I'll start. First things first, my company (Logik), does just eDiscovery processing, so I have an obvious biased response, but I think it's a logikal one.Read more
Earlier this spring, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit took a notable stand to strengthen the Stored Communications Act (SCA).
In Van Alstyne v. Electronic Scriptorium[1] the court broke new ground in SCA litigation by ruling that a civil litigant may be awarded attorney’s fees and punitive damages even in the absence of any proof of actual damages, although statutory damages will be withheld. In this case the court found that for more than a year a former employer had repeatedly accessed his former employee’s personal email account (as opposed to a company account with privacy waivers) – thus violating her personal privacy.Read more
Change is in the air. On March 20, 2009, an eighteen-month collaboration between the ACTL and the IAALS came to fruition through their joint-release of 29 Principles─marking the launch of a new nationwide movement to reform both federal and state rules of civil procedure. The Report includes Proposed Principles touching on eDiscovery (see specifically Principles 12 – 18), and in the coming months these two organizations, together with contributing members of the top echelon of the American and Canadian Trial bar, will be working to assist the implementation of these Principles into pilot projects in the U.S. civil justice system.
Flagging inefficiencies, disproportionate costs and delays, the Final Report emphasizes that the civil justice system is “in serious need of repair,” and that “[t]he traditional ‘one size fits all’ application of uniform rules to all cases . . . no longer works.” Many of us are left to wonder if, in fact, it ever really worked. We can watch for these 29 Principles, together with the Sedona Principles, to be instrumental in the retooling of the rules of civil procedure across the United States. Read more
ALI Stung like a Bee Posted By Daniel Kaiser, Esq. on August 21, 2009
Citing a need for flexibility of commercial law and freedom of contract, and hoping for a lighter touch, the Linux Foundation’s and Microsoft’s recent jointly sent open letter to the American Law Institute (ALI) urged a reconsideration of the ALI’s pending Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. Although competitors in the market, the two software providers came together to point out that the language of the ALI’s forthcoming Principles discriminated among business models, that it would be harmful to the climate of the law surrounding software provision and for related services and support, and that its release should be delayed to allow further input from the software development and user community.Read more
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