Final Exams Take Priority Over a Blog This week

I have been busy now for hours devising a suitably devilish fair examination for the law students at the University of Florida taking the two credit course on e-discovery taught by Bill Hamilton and myself. These questions will, I dare say, exceed the grasp of most practicing attorneys in America, and yet, I predict our students will do well. I may even share the questions and top answers in a future blog. Let me know what you think?

I am confident that the U.F. gators will do an excellent job in this test, far surpassing most praticing attortneys. I am also willing to bet that their answers will exceed that of any law student matriculating in the great state of Alabama. Not that I have sour grapes or anything about a certain football game.

Anyway, because of this test prep work, and computer frustrations (yes, even new Macs can fail), this week’s blog is delayed. Maybe later this week I’ll share the video that I have been working on, but for now its best to re-read and stare at Bill Hamilton’s three-dimensional sanctions cube for a while longer. (Students, that’s a hint!)

So, in the meantime, check out the music, if you have not already, in the bottom right of the blog, and enjoy the snow.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Lawyers Duties. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Ralph’s eDiscovery Books

e-Discovery for Everyone, (ABA, 2017). Also see Ralph's video on this book.
Perspectives on Predictive Coding and Other Advanced Search Methods for the Legal Practitioner, Contributor and co-editor with Jason Baron and Michael Berman, (ABA 2017)
Adventures in Electronic Discovery (West Thomson Reuters, 2011).
Electronic Discovery: New Ideas, Trends, Case Law, and Practices (West Thomson Reuters, 2010).
Introduction to E-Discovery: New Cases, Ideas, and Techniques (ABA 2009).
e-Discovery: Current Trends and Cases (ABA 2008).

About the Blogger

Ralph Losey is a Friend of AIs, Writer, Commentator, Journalist, Lawyer, Arbitrator, Special Master, and Practicing Attorney as a partner in LOSEY PLLC. Losey is a high tech law firm with three Loseys and a bunch of other skilled attorneys. We handle major "bet the company" type litigation, special tech projects, deals, IP of all kinds all over the world, plus other tricky litigation problems all over the U.S. For more details of Ralph's background, Click Here

All opinions expressed here are his own, and not those of his firm or clients. No legal advice is provided on this web and should not be construed as such.

Ralph has long been a leader of the world's tech lawyers. He has presented at hundreds of legal conferences and CLEs around the world. Ralph has written over two million words on e-discovery and tech-law subjects, including seven books.

Ralph has been involved with computers, software, legal hacking and the law since 1980. Ralph has the highest peer AV rating as a lawyer and was selected as a Best Lawyer in America in four categories: Commercial Litigation; E-Discovery and Information Management Law; Information Technology Law; and, Employment Law - Management.

Ralph is the proud father of two children, Eva Losey Grossman, and Adam Losey, a lawyer with incredible litigation and cyber expertise (married to another cyber expert lawyer, Catherine Losey), and best of all, husband since 1973 to Molly Friedman Losey, a mental health counselor in Winter Park.

Sedona Principles 3rd Ed

1. Electronically stored information is generally subject to the same preservation and discovery requirements as other relevant information.

2. When balancing the cost, burden, and need for electronically stored information, courts and parties should apply the proportionality standard embodied in Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(2)(C) and its state equivalents, which require consideration of importance of the issues at stake in the action, the amount in controversy, the parties’ relative access to relevant information, the parties’ resources, the importance of the discovery in resolving the issues, and whether the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit.

3. As soon as practicable, parties should confer and seek to reach agreement regarding the preservation and production of electronically stored information.

4. Discovery requests for electronically stored information should be as specific as possible; responses and objections to discovery should disclose the scope and limits of the production.

5. The obligation to preserve electronically stored information requires reasonable and good faith efforts to retain information that is expected to be relevant to claims or defenses in reasonably anticipated or pending litigation. However, it is unreasonable to expect parties to take every conceivable step or disproportionate steps to preserve each instance of relevant electronically stored information.

6. Responding parties are best situated to evaluate the procedures, methodologies, and technologies appropriate for preserving and producing their own electronically stored information.

7. The requesting party has the burden on a motion to compel to show that the responding party’s steps to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information were inadequate.

8. The primary source of electronically stored information to be preserved and produced should be those readily accessible in the ordinary course. Only when electronically stored information is not available through such primary sources should parties move down a continuum of less accessible sources until the information requested to be preserved or produced is no longer proportional.

9. Absent a showing of special need and relevance, a responding party should not be required to preserve, review, or produce deleted, shadowed, fragmented, or residual electronically stored information.

10. Parties should take reasonable steps to safeguard electronically stored information, the disclosure or dissemination of which is subject to privileges, work product protections, privacy obligations, or other legally enforceable restrictions.

11. A responding party may satisfy its good faith obligation to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information by using technology and processes, such as data sampling, searching, or the use of selection criteria.

12. The production of electronically stored information should be made in the form or forms in which it is ordinarily maintained or in a that is reasonably usable given the nature of the electronically stored information and the proportional needs of the case.

13. The costs of preserving and producing relevant and proportionate electronically stored information ordinarily should be borne by the responding party.

14. The breach of a duty to preserve electronically stored information may be addressed by remedial measures, sanctions, or both: remedial measures are appropriate to cure prejudice; sanctions are appropriate only if a party acted with intent to deprive another party of the use of relevant electronically stored information.

Reprinted courtesy of The Sedona Conference®.

Go to www.thesedonaconference.org to download a free copy of the complete document for your personal use only.

e-Discovery Team ®