eDiscovery Daily Blog

Twenty-One Points, Less Than 350 Words: eDiscovery Best Practices

Yesterday, I wrote about whether judges, like lawyers, should have an explicit technical competence requirement as well.  Leave it to Craig Ball to take a somewhat complex technical concept and break it down to the fewest possible words – i.e., in a “nutshell”.  Hey, judges!  This might be a good place to start!

As Craig notes in the latest blog post on his terrific Ball in Your Court blog (Electronic Storage in a Nutshell), he finished the E-Discovery Workbook for the 2019 Georgetown E-Discovery Training Academy (which we covered here).  The readings and exercises in the Workbook “plot the path that evidence follows from the familiar information items called ‘documents’ that lawyers use in court back to the featureless stream of binary electrical impulses common to all information stored electronically.”  While the Workbook is nearly 500 pages, the technology of eDiscovery is its centerpiece, and Craig has added a 21-point synopsis of the storage concepts, technical takeaways and vocabulary covered.

I won’t steal his thunder and go into all 21-points, but it starts from the premise that “Common law imposes a duty to preserve potentially-relevant information in anticipation of litigation” and ends with the understanding that “Hashing facilitates identification, deduplication and de-NISTing of ESI in e-discovery”.  In between are concepts about things like storage media, how computers store data, how file types and file formats are identified, different types of metadata, what happens to files when they’re deleted and how they can be recovered, and so forth.  21 points, comprised of only 349 words (that’s the count you get when you copy and paste them into Word – sans outline, at least).  And, you thought that “Cliff” was good at summarizing large amounts of text (think about it).  Sometimes, you feel like a nut!  ;o)

With regard to the Georgetown E-Discovery Training Academy, Craig notes (as he did in our blog post covering the coming Academy) that no member of the Academy faculty is compensated and that they are all volunteers.  Which is pretty incredible considering that some of them are devoting up to a week to teach eDiscovery concepts.

Also, just a reminder that CloudNine will be the Scarlett sponsor of the Murder in the Manor charity fundraiser hosted by Oasis Discovery to be held next Thursday May 16th at The Mansion on O Street in Washington DC (2020 O Street NW, Washington, DC 20036).  CloudNine will be running the Speakeasy, where drinks will be available and a lot of fun will be had.  And, all proceeds from the event will benefit the Capital Area Food Bank (CAFB), which is the largest public, non-profit hunger and nutrition education resource in the Washington Metropolitan Area.  Click here for more information and to purchase your tickets.  Remember, it’s for a great cause.

So, what do you think?  Do you feel you have an adequate understanding of technical concepts like electronic storage?  As always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

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