Recently in eDiscovery Category

Maybe it can be chalked off to an economy stung by recession.  Or the fact that more legal technology providers are crowding the same space.  But something is changing the way in-house counsel relates to outside counsel.  And the effects could trickle down to the legal tech sector.

Hildebrandt International has released its annual Hildebrandt Law Department Survey, which provides benchmarking data for U.S. and global law departments. 

Here are a few interesting findings from the Hildebrandt Survey:

Law firms big and small face a similar difficulty with legal technology--estimating its costs.  At early stages of a case it often proves to be a challenge to consider the scope of discovery as a whole--especially when trying to account for the looming variable of eDiscovery costs.  Mining discoverable evidence including email, web-based documents, audio files, photographs, software, and other tech-related evidence is only the beginning of eDiscovery expenditure.  There is also the sorting and analyzing the data and metadata into information that can be used in preparing the case, and finally, finding ways to present the collected and sorted materials in coherent form. 

So, how does a law firm attempt to budget for their legal technology expenditures?  Here are some tips.

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet.

If you were under the misguided impression that attorneys and their litigant clients only need to deal expressly with electronic discovery in federal court, you need to wake up and smell the e-discovery coffee. In the wake of the 2006 e-discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, state legislatures have been getting into the act, adopting e-discovery rules for state court cases. Indeed, more than half of our 50 states have gone this route so far.

California is such a state. At the end of June, Govenor Schwarzenegger signed into law the California Electronic Discovery Act. This law closely resembles the federal e-discovery rules in key respects, and is applicable to cases in the California state court system.

Below is a round-up of the latest news headlines in eDiscovery.

1. Boeing's eDiscovery Destination? CaseCentral.  Boeing joins over 32 Fortune 100 companies in choosing CaseCentral software for its eDiscovery needs.  Boeing has tapped CaseCentral, an eDiscovery software company founded in 1994, to provide repeatable, defensible, and measurable eDiscovery capabilities as the "corporate standard" for new cases.  CaseCentral was among the first to employ use of process analytics, real-time measurement of review rates, quality rates and costs per document. 

Related Resources:

• Boeing Chooses CaseCentral for Company-Wide eDiscovery (CaseCentral)

What do you call an industry that has experienced a 5000% increase over the span of 9 years?  Some may say saturated.

But the e-discovery sector is not backing down, the players are looking to adapt, merge, and continue developing technology and practices in this popular junction of law and technology.

The American Bar Association (ABA) reports that the electronic data discovery industry has expanded from featuring about a dozen providers in 2000 to the 600 that now reside in its domain. 

Are you new to the world of virtual discovery?  First off all, welcome.   

E-discovery involves all of the aspects of civil-litigation discovery, and applies it to electronic information.  If you are foraying into this tech version of discovery, be ready to hear words like metadata, spoliation, ESI, and raw data.  If your eyes aren't already glazed over, relax.  There is lots of help, and luckily most of it is available in just a few convenient clicks.

One way to get up to speed is to read the book for e-discovery newbies---not suggesting you are a dummy in any way---titled "Electronic Discovery for Dummies".  And the book is actually available for free through RenewData.

The hyphenated world of technology that brings us e-mail and i-Phones meets the world of law in the arena of e-Discovery.  If we lost you at a vowel, don't worry, there is help using another law-tech innovation, the educational webcast.

Below are a few upcoming webcasts on a variety of e-law topics.