e-Lessons Learned

Increasingly, our society devotes a lot of time and energy to the use of smartphones. Whether it is a BlackBerry or an iPhone, it is the craze, and many now feel that they need to access their emails from the palm of their hands. And the corporate world is no different. Executives spend as much time focusing on the best ways to read emails, send and receive instant messages, and access the Web as the rest of us.

However, executives (and the corporations they work for) who use company intranets, also need to worry about the possibility of unintentional data distribution — meaning they should concern themselves with the fact that confidential information may be disseminated unintentionally or unexpectedly to the public. Continue reading »

We are happy to report that we have been named the official blog of Campbell University’s Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law’s Annual Law Review Symposium entitled Emerging Issues in Electronic Discovery. This educational event is on Friday, January 22 from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Taken from the promotional materials created for the event: Continue reading »

In this recent opinion, one Texas Court applied the Zubulake cost-shifting factors to a shampoo company’s unsupported argument that the opposing party should have to share the costs of performing OCR… and booted their argument to the curb.

At the pre-trial Case Management Conference, the Court ordered the parties to submit estimates of the costs involved in the production of documents in searchable Tagged Image File Format (“TIFF”) with Optical Character Recognition (“OCR”) before it made a ruling on the format of electronic discovery. Continue reading »

Ever since the Enron destruction of documents debacle, one would think that corporate executives would realize that destroying evidence probably isn’t the greatest idea. Nonetheless, they seem to keep on shredding and pressing delete as if there were no tomorrow.

In Smith v. Slifer, one of the defendant entity’s executives, after being served with notice of the lawsuit, allegedly took it upon himself to download and use a program called Anti Tracks in order to wipe clean his home personal computer of allegedly damaging evididence. I emphasize the word “allegedly” because the Anti Tracks program was apparently pretty effective, rendering it impossible for plaintiff’s experts to garner any concrete evidence that relevant evidence was in fact destroyed (although they were easily able to establish that several documents were deleted). Continue reading »