You Can’t Always Get What You Want

April 29, 2011

You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you might find
You get what you need…

Or you may NOT! Simply wanting data in discovery and getting that data are two completely different things. Be careful that the data you are requesting is not overly burdensome and it’s truly important to the issues at hand.

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Upcoming Event: 4th eDiscovery for Financial Services Convention

February 8, 2011

From February 14-16, 2011, IQPC will be hosting the 4th Annual eDiscovery for Financial Services conference at the Sentry Center in New York City. Each year, IQPC collects U.S. District Court Judges, in-house counsel, IT experts, document management, law firms, solution providers, and regulatory experts to speak on how to improve eDiscovery processes in the wake of rising regulatory scrutiny and increased litigation.

Conference topics include:

  • How the Dodd-Frank Act will affect you
  • Lessons learned from the BP oil spill disaster
  • Capturing and storing ESI from social media
  • Finding money-saving solutions

Download the full event brochure by clicking here.

Registration is still open, and may be done electronically by visiting the following link: Register today!


You’ve Got a Friend in Vendors … Until They Screw Up

March 30, 2010

Suppose you’ve got a business. Not just any business, however, but a state-of-the-art business. Not necessarily a business that sells state-of-the-art products or services, but a business that you run in a state-of-the-art manner. Instead of carrying briefcases full of notes, you’ve got compact flash cards full of data. You don’t even remember the cost of a first-class stamp because all of your correspondence is done by email. You don’t have boxes and drawers full of hard files around the office because you’ve got everything stored and backed-up on hard drives and servers. You don’t have a calendar on your desk because you’ve got your daily schedule synched to the Smartphone that never leaves your side. You use every possible gadget to make sure that you are doing everything in the most technologically advanced and efficient way possible.

Now, think to yourself: What happens one day when your company winds up on the wrong end of a lawsuit? Perhaps even a completely bogus, frivolous lawsuit. Even if you know that you’ll end up victorious in the end, you might find yourself bogged down in an eDiscovery quagmire once you have to turn over all of your “documents” during discovery. Continue reading »


Arista Records to Usenet: Time to Face the Music (Redux)

September 12, 2009

When last we left our wily defendants, Gary Reynolds and Usenet.com had just been sanctioned for spoliation of evidence requested by the plaintiffs on numerous occasions. As an explanation for their failure to produce the evidence, Gary Reynolds had argued, in part, that relevant data had “expired off the system through normal system operational attrition.” That is, according to Reynolds, the destruction of data pertinent to their case was not a willful attempt to prevent the plaintiffs from obtaining the data. It was nothing more than the inevitable consequence of the limited storage space on his company’s computers. Continue reading »


Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to the Battle of the Experts

June 2, 2009

While filing six different motions to mirror image a third party’s computer may make the senior partners at your firm really happy that you are bringing in the big bucks, unless you have discovered something that there was absolutely no way of knowing about previously, you should probably cut your losses and move on. The plaintiff in this case alleged that prior to Meesham Neergheen leaving Mintel; he emailed himself Mintel documents via his personal email account and was using these documents at his current employer Datamonitor.

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eDiscovery Special Masters – The New Kid on the Block is Here to Stay

April 21, 2009

In a recent law review article, The Honorable Shira A. Scheindlin, U.S.D.J. (Southern District of New York) and Jonathan M. Redgrave address the recent revisions to Rule 53 and discovery rules, and articulate appropriate uses of special masters in the growing world of e-discovery. They predict eDiscovery Special Masters to be the next big thing in e-discovery.

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ScrapTextbook e-Discovery Request

February 7, 2009

In an action for copyright infringement and unfair competition, under both Federal and State law, Antioch claimed that Scrapbook was selling copyrighted products. Antioch claimed that without permission, Scrapbook sold decorative sticker designs owned by a division of Antioch called Creative Marketing.

Antioch asked the Court to start discovery early because it believed that Scrapbook was destroying incriminating documents. Before the Court reached the Plaintiff’s motions, it denied the Defendant’s motion to stop the litigation because of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act of 1940. The Court found that although one of the defendant’s was in active service, he was deployed in the United States, and served only 2 out of every 4 weeks.

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How Chickens and Eggs Relate to Patents and Infringement

January 23, 2009

Let’s say you download an e-book of Aesop’s Fables to look for the story “The Milkmaid and Her Pail.” You think of search terms and come up with: milkmaid, pail, count, chickens, hatched. Then what? If you want to find the story, you do the search. However, if you’re pretty sure the story is there but you don’t really want to find it, you might search other terms. Well, as Qualcomm found out, the second option doesn’t work so well when it comes to discovery.

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