e-Lessons Learned

Don’t be afraid to challenge electronic discovery requests, and certainly do not be afraid to challenge a court’s e-discovery ruling. In Re Stern, the Defendant Stern, appealed a Texas lower court’s decision that required him to surrender his hard drive to a special master appointed by the court who would perform a forensic examination of his computer hard drive, external hard drive, jump drives and other such repositories of electronic communications. Guess what? (sigh of relief) Stern won.

On appeal, Stern argued that surrendering his hard drive exceeded the scope of the discovery relevant to the case, and that since he had made no showing of bad faith when attempting to comply with Plaintiff’s original discovery demands this was an abuse of the court’s discretion. Continue reading »

Everyone knows that the iPhone is a superior method of communication. It far surpasses all other computers, smart phones, company email accounts, Morse code, smoke signals and binary code communications. And most importantly, IT CANNOT BE ACCESSED BY YOUR BUSINESS PARTNER. In Gates v. Wheeler, 2010 Minn. App. Unpub. LEXIS 1136 (Minn. Ct. App. Nov. 23, 2010), the respondent may have been vindicated, but the problem was partly of his own making.

In Gates, Gates sued his business partner, Wheeler, for equitable relief concerning their jointly held LLC. The two were the sole partners and could not agree on business decisions. As they were deadlocked, Gates sued to have the court remedy the situation. Fairly typical case until Wheeler decided to cheat.

Continue reading »

Why do something twice when you could have done it correctly the first time? When an opposing party requests production of electronically stored information, you are required to produce that information in the form that it is ordinarily maintained in your system. If you make any changes to the form of that electronic information, that renders it more difficult for the opposing party to use it, a court will likely make you produce the information a second time correctly. Who has time to produce information twice? Who is going to explain to your client why you had to bill them twice to accomplish one thing?

That is exactly what the court ordered a company to do in Jannx Medical Systems, Inc. v. Methodist Hospitals, Inc. Continue reading »

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!

According to other technology bloggers, there has been significant development in cloud security…which is sure to have an impact on e-discovery. What’s cloud security? To understand where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been.

Anyone who uses computers for their home or business is connected to a server. A server is a software program (or a computer that runs the program) which provides a specific service to the computer(s) connected to it. Each server has a finite amount of power, so (1) it will run slower as the number of networked computers connected to it increase; (2) it will run slower as the size of the jobs requested by the network increase; or (3) both. You’ve probably experienced this at work: you and fifty of your coworkers are trying to print huge .pdf files simultaneously and it’s taking F-O-R-E-V-E-R.

Lucky for us office-types, IT specialists have discovered that the efficiency of the server-network interaction can be increased by using groups of servers instead of just one. A group of servers sharing tasks requested by a network is called a “cloud.” Chuck Hollis, who wrote the article on which this post is based, provides this definition:

By “cloud”, I mean any next-generation IT environment that’s (1) built differently — dynamic pools of virtualized resources, (2) operated differently — purpose-built zero-touch or low-touch operational models, and (3) consumed conveniently — use of resource includes pay-for-use models, or other forms of convenient consumption.

A pay-for-use model just means that you pay, for example, fifteen cents per gigabyte of information exchanged. Pricing may also be determined by the time it takes for the cloud to complete a specified task.

Why Clouds Deserve Special Treatment

When there are parts of projects from multiple networks going to clouds of servers, tracking information and protecting it from hackers can become difficult. Enter: Cloud Security Takes a Big Leap Forward. This article presents solutions to cloud-security problems.

Continue reading »