Recently in eDiscovery & Records Management Category

Image metadata is what led to software pioneer John McAfee's arrest, which has led a lot of people, especially lawyers, to ask what metadata is and how it may affect litigation.

It's not an incomprehensible technology, but it is a powerful tool for finding information about digital documents and images. Unless you take the time to strip it out, there is revealing metadata on every digital file you have, including briefs and evidence photos.

You don't want to give anything away about your own case, but you also want to know how to get this information from your opponents. So it's time for a crash course in metadata.

Assistants and paralegals can make life as a lawyer much easier. And sometimes they can also help make you rich. But for the little things, like organizing your email inbox, assistants can prove invaluable.

Unfortunately, not every firm or solo practitioner can afford one. Sometimes you have to do everything on your own. As a result, organization can occasionally fall to the wayside. And email inboxes are usually the first casualty.

If this sounds like you, try taking the following steps to free yourself from the nightmare of a cluttered inbox.

As if lawyers need any more reasons to fear for their livelihoods in a tight job market, here’s another: Predictive coding is becoming more popular, and could make human document review somewhat obsolete.

Yes, the rise of robots is reaching into the realm of entry-level and contract legal work, the website Lawyerist reports. What used to take a roomful of document reviewers days, weeks, or even months to complete, can now largely be done by computer programs designed to quickly sift through terabytes of electronic data.

E-discovery. The very word can mean salvation for lawyers who are tired of dredging through thousands of pages of hard copy documents during the lengthy, time-consuming discovery process.

But, e-discovery is not as simple as it seems.

Sanctions for e-discovery violations are steep, and attorneys now also have to work in conjunction with IT teams to produce the discovery and map out how to produce the electronic documents.

In the first few phases of gathering and preparing your e-discovery, there are three easy steps that you can keep in mind to smooth over the process.

Technology research firm Gartner has ventured into the world of litigation, releasing its first ever e-Discovery Magic Quadrant, an evaluation of 24 of the top vendors touting e-Discovery solutions.

A graphical representation of each firm's relative position in today's market, Gartner's report places each company in one of four categories: leaders, challengers, visionaries and niche players.

If you or your firm is in the process of purchasing and evaluating new software, the e-Discovery Magic Quadrant might be for you.

A litigant may waive privilege when an inadvertent disclosure is made as a result of a failure to check a production database created by an e-Discovery vendor prior to its going live.

In other words, attorneys who fail to double-check production databases and ensure that no privileged documents have been improperly included may be accidentally waiving privilege.

This decision from a federal judge in the Northern District of Illinois means an attorney could open  themselves up to a malpractice suit.

Technology and computers has shifted most legal work from paperwork to digital work. The computer age, however, provides some interesting entanglement with ethics, especially when you run into sticky situations with the law: like when attorney-client privilege and laptops end up mixed together.

For example, what happens to attorney-client privilege if a search warrant is issued against you?

Well, of course you’d alert the authorities and whoever is searching your stuff that some of the materials they are gathering are potentially privileged.

In early June, a lawsuit accused mega-firm McDermott Will and Emery of e-Discovery malpractice, an allegation that stems from the firm's reported failure to supervise off-site staff attorneys, which in turn led to the production of nearly 4,000 privileged documents.

Though there have been few widely publicized cases of e-Discovery malpractice, if you ask LeClairRyan partner Dennis Kiker, it's a lot more common than attorneys would like to think it is.

You may have even committed it yourself.

In Florida, email pleadings may soon be the wave of the future.

Instead of having to deal with a mass amount of paper and complaints heading toward your way via the U.S. Postal Service, Florida attorneys may soon be facing a deluge of e-mail pleadings.

The Florida Bar is proposing that the state change its pleading methods so that attorneys must exchange pleadings with each other via e-mail instead of via paper, reports the AP.

Judge Royce Lambeth has imposed an inventive Rule 37 discovery sanction on the District of Columbia (D.C.), reports the ABA Journal.

In a class action, D.C.'s attorneys showed up for trial without having produced thousands of emails requested by plaintiffs in pretrial discovery.

D.C.'s attorneys protested they had too little staff, and that they "kept finding new caches of emails," reports the ABA Journal.

Finally, D.C. agreed to produce the documents on a "rolling basis" after the trial was over.