e-discovery 2.0

Jason R. Baron was a keynote speaker at a recent electronic discovery summit and he mentioned an electronic data discovery topic that “ought to be blogged about.”  So, with that kind of softball I had to take a swing, particularly because it’s been a topic we (at e-discovery 2.0) have been discussing lately.

The genesis of this blog (per Jason) is the recent “skepticism” evidenced by the bench regarding the defensibility of custodian based collections.  ARMA has a good piece on this very topic, entitled “Is ‘Manual’ Collection of ESI Defensible?”  The core notion is that the tried and true practice of custodian based ESI collection is now under fire by courts, which appear to be looking at this practice with an increasing level of distrust.

“While it is common for companies to use automated data-collection software and hardware, some corporate litigants opt for more informal, “manual” collection methods (i.e., searches performed by individual records custodians) when responding to ESI requests. Companies may choose the manual collection of ESI to reduce costs, particularly if they have limited levels of litigation or lower risk levels posed by the litigation itself.”

While there’s no dispute that the “automated” collection methods available in litigation software referenced above have a number of features that make this approach more efficient, the question is whether a “manual” (i.e., custodian based) collection process is somehow less defensible.  If this is truly the case, then many midsized companies without the budget to purchase such e-discovery applications will inherently be found deficient – which is a daunting notion.

Take the recent case of Ford Motor Co. v. Edgewood Properties Inc., 257 F.R.D. 418 (D.N.J. 2009) where the dispute arose out of the demolition of a Ford assembly plant in New Jersey.  Ford and Edgewood entered into a contract whereby Ford agreed to provide 50,000 cubic yards of concrete to Edgewood in exchange for Edgewood removing it from the site.  When the concrete turned out to be contaminated, the dispute started in earnest.

The crux of Edgewood’s complaint was that it was unhappy with Ford’s production and somehow suspected that the dearth of documents was due to the electronic data collection process.  Edgewood sought to “’confirm the adequacy of Ford’s manual document collection process’ by using a third-party vendor to perform keyword searches on documents not in the existing repository of ESI, but instead, documents within the possession of certain Ford custodians.”

To reconcile the dispute the court looked to the Sedona Conference’s work in the area:

“In The Sedona Conference Best Practices Commentary on the Use of Search and Information Retrieval Methods in E-Discovery, Practice Point 1 states that “[i]n many settings involving electronically stored information, reliance solely on a manual search process for the purpose of finding responsive documents may be infeasible or unwarranted. In such cases, the use of automated search methods should be viewed as reasonable, valuable, and even necessary.”(emphasis added). Once again, the Court confronts this peculiar situation insofar as Edgewood has a point that the document collection method used by Ford is not necessarily contemplated under the Sedona Principles, but that agreement by the parties at the outset as to the mode of collection would have been the proper and efficacious course of action.  However, “[a]bsen[t] agreement, a [responding] party has the presumption, under Sedona Principle 6, that it is in the best position to choose an appropriate method of searching and culling data.”

Accordingly, the court found that the lack of agreement coupled with Ford being in the best position to make a call about the methodology, was a deciding factor in generally upholding Ford’s manual collection process.

“It would be improvident at this juncture to grant Edgewood the relief it seeks when it has not shown any indicia of bad faith on the part of Ford. To countenance such a holding would unreasonably put the shoe on the other foot and require a producing party to go to herculean and costly lengths (especially in a document-heavy case such as this) in the face of mere accusation to rebut a claim of withholding. This scenario is not contemplated by the Federal Rules.”

While Ford wasn’t penalized for its manual collection, this practice has come under fire in several other opinions.  In the highly controversial case of Phillip M. Adams & Assoc., LLC v. Dell, Inc., 621 F. Supp. 2d 1173 (D. Utah 2009) custodian based collection/preservation policies were similarly under fire.

“ASUS’ practices invite the abuse of rights of others, because the practices tend toward loss of data. The practices place operations-level employees in the position of deciding what information is relevant to the enterprise and its data retention needs. ASUS alone bears responsibility for the absence of evidence it would be expected to possess. While Adams has not shown ASUS mounted a destructive effort aimed at evidence affecting Adams or at evidence of ASUS’ wrongful use of intellectual property, it is clear that ASUS’ lack of a retention policy and irresponsible data retention practices are responsible for the loss of significant data.”

Adams was in fact cited by Judge Scheindlin in her latest opus – Pension Comm. of the Univ. of Montreal Pension Plan v. Banc of America Sec. LLC, No. 05 Civ. 9016, 2010 U.S. Dist. Lexis 4546, at *1 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 15, 2010), where she found fault with the Plaintiff’s reliance on manual collections:

“This instruction does not meet the standard for a litigation hold. It does not direct employees to preserve all relevant records–both paper and electronic-nor does it create a mechanism for collecting the preserved records so that they can be searched by someone other than the employee.  Rather, the directive places total reliance on the employee to search and select what that employee believed to be responsive records without any supervision from Counsel.

From the foregoing, it’s probably too early to call the skepticism over manual collection a trend per se.  Certainly, lobbing a preservation notice over the proverbial wall to custodians without the requisite level of supervision is a recipe for disaster.  Education (about the matter and the required tasks), compliance (with the preservation instructions) and ongoing monitoring (to ensure that compliance continues over time) are all critical responsibilities that must be thoughtfully undertaken by counsel for a defensible ediscovery process.

The question then becomes, is the problem here really about the “manual” collection efforts by the custodians or more simply the fact that they aren’t supervised with the requisite degree of care?  If this is the case, which I’d opine that it is, then “properly executed” manual collections should be fine (i.e., defensible).

But, as Ford indicates, if your company is going to rely upon a manual collection modus operandi, then it may be advisable to let the opposition in on the use of this tactic.  This approach may be mandated by local rule or it may just be the type of transparent cooperation that’s all the rage these days.

Part I of this series discussed a number of approaches for reducing electronic discovery costs.  One of the approaches is to implement a document retention policy.  The popularity of document retention policies increased in the early part of the decade with the passage of new financial regulation, such as Sarbanes-Oaxley.  Data retention policy popularity has now increased again with the passage of the FRCP and the recognition of the challenge of electronic discovery costs.  How effective, though, are document retention policies in reducing electronic discovery costs?  Do they solve the electronic discovery cost problem?

It is certainly true that any policy that enforces the deletion of documents that might otherwise be discoverable should reduce electronic discovery costs.  Thus, document retention policies, just like enforced mailbox size limits, can absolutely help reduce e-discovery costs.  However, implementing a retention policy is not easy.  A recent article in the New York Law Journal by Adam Rosman is very insightful in this regard when he says, “the rub is implementation.”   Mr. Rosman outlines a conversation between a hypothetical company’s Associate General Counsel and the CTO that demonstrates that the major challenge with retention policies is not designing one.  Rather, the challenge is implementing a policy that effectively balances the needs for litigation readiness and e-discovery, regulatory compliance and knowledge management and can be cost-effectively enforced throughout a company’s IT organization and user community.  Given this, it’s not surprising that a 2006 study by Nextpage and CXO research found that “while two-thirds of the companies surveyed have a document retention policy in effect, almost half of them don’t actively enforce it” and why 39% of respondents cited implementing a standard policy and 34% percent said user compliance were major weaknesses in implementing retention policies.

Because of these implementation challenges, retention policies are not a quick way to reduce your e-discovery costs.  They are also not going to reduce enough data to solve an organization’s e-discovery cost “problem.”  First, due to the implementation challenges, retention policies are not going to delete all the electronically stored information (ESI) they should.  Second, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oaxley (SOX) and FINRA regulations require that many documents must be retained for several years.  Finally, business users will demand many exceptions: emails, loose files, collaboration content, financial records, contracts, etc. that they want to save beyond the retention period for important business reasons.  As a result, even companies with retention policies are going to have a substantial and growing amount of discoverable ESI and the electronic discovery costs that go with that.

Document retention policies thus are a bit like taking vitamins.  They are likely going to help reduce the amount of time you are sick – although you’ll probably find some “studies” that say they do help and some that don’t.  But when you get sick, they aren’t going to make you better.  For that, you need a remedy that directly targets the specific problem.  Similarly, document retention policies, and you can say the same thing about all information management solutions to e-discovery, will help reduce e-discovery costs, but they won’t solve the e-discovery cost problem.  Specific e-discovery solutions are necessary to do that.  We’ll discuss many of these specific e-discovery solutions in the next set of posts in this series.

In the post, E-Discovery 911: Reducing E-Discovery Costs in a Recession, we analyzed the question: which electronic discovery activities are the most costly today and thus have the greatest room for cost reductions? An analysis of a typical, hypothetical case demonstrated that the bulk of e-discovery costs reside in the processing and review stages. In this post, we want to look at the different ways of reducing e-discovery costs and which are likely to be the most effective, especially given processing and review costs are the largest sources of expense.

Corporations have the following options for reducing e-discovery costs. Some of these approaches are aimed at changing the overall way e-discovery is performed. And some of these are aimed at improving the results of a particular step within a typical e-discovery process. None of the options are mutually exclusive.

• Retain less data through information management: one of the methods that corporations can undertake to reduce e-discovery costs even before e-discovery has begun is to adopt a data or document retention policy. Such a policy can, for example, stipulate that the corporation deletes all documents not required for specific business, legal or compliance reasons after a fixed period of time, such as 90 days. As a result, a properly implemented document retention policy has the potential to significantly reduce the amount of data that is identified and collected during electronic discovery.

• Better assess your case and your discovery issues: another approach to reducing the overall costs of litigation including discovery is to perform an early case assessment. Pioneered by Dupont and others, the objective of this approach is to understand all the key case facts within a short period of time so that the litigation team can make better decisions quicker. Because costs always rise over time, quicker resolution of litigation reduces costs. While early case assessment was originally an overall approach to litigation, there is now an equivalent in electronic discovery. The goal is to identify all the potentially discoverable data, but only collect, process, and analyze a prioritized portion of this data in order to inform an understanding of the case AND calculate an estimate of the ultimate potential e-discovery costs.

• Bring e-discovery in-house: another holistic method for reducing electronic discovery costs is to manage all or a portion of the e-discovery process in some or all matters inside the Enterprise as opposed to outsourcing it to law firms or litigation service providers. While bringing e-discovery in-house has other benefits, such as improved security and control, the principal benefit is to convert variable service costs, typically priced on a per Gigabyte basis, into fixed software costs thus producing a return on the investment to manage e-discovery in-house.

• Preserve and collect less data: in addition to holistic approaches, e-discovery costs can be reduced at each step in the e-discovery process. One way to reduce e-discovery costs would be to preserve and collect less data. Reducing the amount of preserved and collected data not only reduces the cost of each of these steps but also reduces the cost of each downstream step. There are pros and cons to this approach which I will discuss in a later post.

• Process less data: more data is frequently preserved and collected than needs to be processed for analysis and review. This excess data can be filtered out prior to processing thus reducing processing and all other downstream costs. The techniques used to do this are often referred to as pre-filtering, pre-processing or early data analysis.

• Process differently and review native: historically, most electronic data was converted to an image format, such as TIFF, prior to review. This process is computationally intensive and expensive. In recent years, e-discovery practitioners have been processing and reviewing more documents in a native or near-native format and avoiding the cost of converting documents to an image format until later in the process.

• Review less data: data can also be reduced after processing and prior to review and production. Much has been written in the e-discovery community about this process, often called “cull-down,” and the different search and analysis techniques that can be used as part of this process, such as keyword search, concept search, de-duplication, and others. The fewer documents requiring processing and review, which as we have seen is a substantial portion of the overall costs, the lower the overall costs.

• Review data faster: in addition to reducing less data, the electronic discovery community has pioneered new methods of reviewing data faster including data clustering, near de-duplication, and other more automated review techniques. The faster documents are reviewed, the lower the attorney review costs.

While all of these approaches have the potential to reduce the costs of electronic discovery, some are going to be more effective than others. Each approach can be implemented using a multitude of techniques or practices and each of these techniques has their pros and cons. For example, some techniques may have a greater risk of raising defensibility issues from the court or opposing side than others. Other practices may be less expensive initially, but, over the course of a changing and iterative e-discovery, may prove to be more costly overall. In a series of future posts, we’ll review the different practices used as part of these approaches and analyze the pros and cons of each to understand which may be the most effective for your organization.