Five years after the changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) our professions should have worked out the kinks in collecting, processing, culling, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information (ESI).
And yet, most haven’t. ESI is still being created in the
main through the use of Microsoft Word and Outlook for written communications.
Social networking and smartphones and tablets are complicating matters, but
they’re not yet primary sources of discoverable ESI.
Virtualization and cloud computing are adding to the
complexity of the enterprise technology environment. While that contributes to
e-discovery challenges, it doesn’t justify most of the issues being presented
by litigants. The main problems lie elsewhere.
Here’s a collection of key
takeaways from recent cases involving e-discovery errors.