Ethics
May 06, 2013
By Doug Austin
In Distefano v. Law Offices of Barbara H. Katsos, PC., New York Magistrate Judge A. Kathleen Tomlinson found that the defendant (an attorney who was being sued by the plaintiff she previously represented for breach of contract, negligence/legal malpractice, and breach of fiduciary duty/duty of care) had a duty to preserve information from a discarded computer and ordered a hearing for the defendant to address a number of questions to determine the potential relevance of the destroyed data and whether the defendant had a sufficiently culpable state of mind.
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April 08, 2013
By Doug Austin
Some of the recent stories involving alleged overbilling by law firms for legal work – much of it for document review – begs the question whether it’s time to ditch the per hour model for document review in place of a per document rate for review?
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December 04, 2012
By Doug Austin
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has announced new Guidelines for counsel and litigants regarding the discovery of electronically stored information (“ESI”) effective as of last Tuesday (November 27). The Guidelines were developed by a bench-bar committee chaired by Magistrate Judge Elizabeth D. Laporte in partnership with the Court’s Rules Committee and unanimously approved by the entire Court.
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October 04, 2012
By Doug Austin
Take a closer look – that’s not the EDRM model you see above. It’s the new EDBP model.
EDBP stands for Electronic Discovery Best Practices and is the brainchild of Ralph Losey, whose e-Discovery Team® blog is one of the must-read blogs (and one of the most in-depth) in the industry. Ralph is also National e-Discovery Counsel with the law firm of Jackson Lewis, LLP, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Florida College of Law teaching eDiscovery and advanced eDiscovery and has also previously been a thought leader interviewee on this blog. Other than all that, he’s not very busy.
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August 31, 2012
By Doug Austin
Our 501st post on the blog addresses S2 Automation LLC v. Micron Technology, where New Mexico District Judge James Browning ordered the plaintiff’s attorneys to disclose the search strategy their client used to identify responsive documents, based on Federal Rule 26(g) that requires attorneys to sign discovery responses and certify that they are “complete and correct.”
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August 17, 2012
By Doug Austin
In E.E.O.C. v Fry’s Electronics, Inc., Washington District Judge Robert S. Lasnik ordered several sanctions against the defendant in this sexual harassment case (including ordering the defendant to pay $100,000 in monetary sanctions and ordering that certain evidence be considered presumptively admissible at trial), but stopped short of entering a default judgment against the defendant. This ruling came after having previously ordered sanctions against the defendant less than two months earlier.
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August 13, 2012
By Doug Austin
As noted in ABA Journal, Greenberg Traurig and its client, TD Bank, have received sanctions in Coquina Investments v. Rothstein for a “pattern of discovery abuses before, during, and after trial”. As U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke noted, “it often times appears that this litigation was conducted in an Inspector Clouseau-like fashion. However, unlike a Pink Panther film, there was nothing amusing about this conduct and it did not conclude neatly.”
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July 24, 2012
By Doug Austin
The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) has made numerous contributions to the eDiscovery industry since it was founded in 2005, with the EDRM diagram (above) having become a universally accepted standard – rare in our industry – to reflect the eDiscovery life cycle. Last year, we noted the introduction of the EDRM Model Code of Conduct (MCoC), which focuses on the ethical duties of service providers associated with these five key principles and also provides a corollary for each principle to illustrate ethical duties of their clients. Now, your organization can subscribe to the MCoC to demonstrate its commitment to conducting itself in an ethical manner.
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June 27, 2012
By Doug Austin
As noted in Law Technology News, eDiscovery vendor iConect hosted a free webinar last week entitled "Duty of Competency and E-Discovery", in which Joshua Gilliland, author of Bow Tie Law's Blog and founder of legal iPad app developer Majority Opinion, discussed ethics and eDiscovery with Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
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