Terminated!

This article really pumped me up…

It looks like our friend Arnold is having some trouble producing documents for an eDiscovery request. So who is the terminator’s worthy adversary? A group of juvenile parolees. The parolees filed suit because they claim that their 14th amendment rights were violated. According to the parolees the discovery request they made was significantly delayed and caused detrimental harm to their case. They also claim that Arnold failed to produce all documents that were requested including databases and logs.

Although Arnold was able to produce over 55,000 documents the court determined it was not enough to comply with the order. Arnold’s office also claimed that there was only one person performing the discovery search and they had been overwhelmed with requests and she had family issues during the time the requests came through. The judge was less than sympathetic stating that it was not appropriate to assigned just one person to the request and that the defendant failed to solve problems with discovery conferences.

Arnold also took it on the chin for the type of documents produced. The documents were converted to .pdf before being sent to the plaintiff. In the documents original form they were searchable. Once converted to .pdf they were not. This created additional burden for the plaintiffs in the case. The judge ruled that if the documents in their original format were searchable then there is no reason why they can’t be given to the plaintiff as searchable documents.

I guess the lessons learned from this are that you should take all discovery requests seriously. Follow the EDRM process and meet with the requesting party to make sure that you understand the request and resolve any differences. If a good faith effort was seen by the judge in this case then he would not have mentioned the problems with the discovery conferences. Also, produce documents in either their original format or in a format that is useful to the requesting party. You might be seen as being uncooperative if you produce documents that cause the requesting party to have an additional burden during the review process.

Hasta la vista, baby! :)

Source Link: http://www.rcalaw.com/component/option,com_myblog/show,judge-sanctions-state-of-california-with-ediscovery-violations.html/Itemid,0/

ERDM Process: http://www.edrm.net/

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eDiscovery, Electronic Discovery Reference Model, EDRM, Email Archiving, Compliance