Though easy to get caught up in the opinion’s rhetoric (“[i]t smacks of chutzpah (no definition required) to argue that the Magistrate failed to balance the costs and benefits of preservation . . .”), the Pippins case confirms the importance of both cooperation and proportionality in eDiscovery. With respect to cooperation, the court emphasized that parties should take reasonable positions in discovery so as to reach mutually agreeable results. The order also stressed the importance of communicating with the court to clarify discovery obligations.  In that regard, the court faulted the parties and the magistrate for not seeking the court’s clarification with respect to its prior order staying discovery. The court explained that the discovery stay – which KPMG had understood to prevent any sampling of the hard drives – could have been partially lifted to allow for sampling. And this, in turn, could have obviated the costs and delays associated with the motion practice on this matter.

Regarding proportionality, the court confirmed the importance of this doctrine in determining the scope of preservation. Indeed, the court declared that proportionality is typically “determinative” of a motion for protective order. Nevertheless, the court could not engage in a proportionality analysis – weighing the benefits of preserving the hard drives against its burdens – as the defendant had not yet produced any evidence from the hard drives to evaluate the nature of the evidence. Only after the evidence from a sampling of hard drives had been produced and evaluated could such a determination be made.

The Pippins case demonstrates that courts have raised their expectations for how litigants will engage in eDiscovery. Staking out unreasonable positions in the name of zealous advocacy stands in stark contrast to the clear trend that discovery should comply with the cost cutting mandate of Federal Rule 1. Cooperation and proportionality are two of the principal touchstones for effectuating that mandate.

Although there is no explicit language in FINRA’s Regulatory Notices 10-06 (January 2010) or 11-30 (August 2011) requiring archival, the record keeping component of the notices necessitate social media archiving in most cases due to the sheer volume of data produced on social media sites. Melanie Kalemba, Vice President of Business Development at SocialWare in Austin, Texas states:

“Our clients in the financial industry have led the way, they have paved the road for other industries, making social media usage less daunting. Best practices for monitoring third-party content, record keeping responsibilities, and compliance programs are available and developed for other industries to learn from. The template is made.”

eDiscovery and Privacy Implications. Privacy laws are an important aspect of social media use that impact discoverability. Discovery and privacy represent layers of the Rubik’s cube in the ever-changing and complex social media environment. No longer are social media cases only personal injury suits or HR incidents, although those are plentiful. For example, in Largent v. Reed the court ruled that information posted by a party on their personal Facebook page was discoverable and ordered the plaintiff to provide user name and password to enable the production of the information. In granting the motion to compel the Defendant’s login credentials, Judge Walsh acknowledged that Facebook has privacy settings, and that users must take “affirmative steps” to keep their information private. However, his ruling determined that no social media privacy privilege exists: “No court has recognized such a privilege, and neither will we.” He further reiterated his ruling by adding, “[o]nly the uninitiated or foolish could believe that Facebook is an online lockbox of secrets.”

Then there are the new cases emerging over social media account ownership which affect privacy and discoverability. In the recently filed Phonedog v. Kravitz, 11-03474 (N.D. Cal.; Nov. 8, 2011), the lines between the “professional” versus the “private” user are becoming increasingly blurred. This case also raises questions about proprietary client lists, valuations on followers, and trade secrets  – all of which are further complicated when there is no social media policy in place. The financial services industry has been successful in implementing effective social media policies along with technology to comply with agency mandates – not only because they were forced to by regulation, but because they have developed best practices that essentially incorporate social media into their document retention policies and information governance infrastructures.

Regulatory Framework. Adding another Rubik’s layer are the multitude of regulatory and compliance issues that many industries face. The most active and vocal regulators for guidance in the US on social media have been FINRA, the SEC and the FTC. FINRA initiated guidance to the financial services industry, and earlier this month the SEC issued their alert. The SEC’s exam alert to registered investment advisers issued on January 4, 2012 was not meant to be a comprehensive summary for compliance related to the use of social media. Instead, it lays out staff observations of three major categories: third party content, record keeping and compliance – expounding on FINRA’s notice.

Last year the FTC issued an extremely well done Preliminary FTC Staff Report on Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers.  Three main components are central to the report. The first is a call for all companies to build privacy and security mechanisms into new products – considering the possible negative ramifications at the outset, avoiding social media and privacy issues as an afterthought. The FTC has cleverly coined the notion, “Privacy by Design.” Second, “Just-In-Time” is a concept about notice and encourages companies to communicate with the public in a simple way that prompts them to make informed decisions about their data in terms that are clear and that require an affirmative action (i.e., checking a box). Finally, the FTC calls for greater transparency around data collection, use and retention. The FTC asserts that consumers have a right to know what kind of data companies collect, and should have access to the sensitivity and intended use of that data. The FTC’s report is intended to inform policymakers, including Congress, as they legislate on privacy – and to motivate companies to self-regulate and develop best practices. 

David Shonka, Principal Deputy General Counsel at the FTC in Washington, D.C., warns, “There is a real tension between the situations where a company needs to collect data about a transaction versus the liabilities associated with keeping unneeded data due to privacy concerns. Generally, archiving everything is a mistake.” Shonka arguably reinforces the case for instituting an intelligent archive, whether a company is regulated or not;  an archive that is selective about what it ingests based on content, and that has an appropriate deletion cycle applied to defined data types/content according to a policy. This will ensure expiry of private consumer information in a timely manner, but retains the benefits of retrieval for a defined period if necessary.

The Non-Regulated Use Case­. When will comprehensive social media policies, retention and monitoring become more prevalent in the non-regulated sectors? In the case of FINRA and the SEC, regulations were issued to the financial industry. In the case of the FTC, guidance had been given to companies regarding how to avoid false advertisement and protect consumer privacy. The two are not dissimilar in effect. Both require a social media policy, monitoring, auditing, technology, and training. While there is no clear mandate to archive social media if you are in a non-regulated industry, this can’t be too far away. This is evidenced by companies that have already implemented social media monitoring systems for reasons like brand promotion/protection, or healthcare companies that deal with highly sensitive information. If social media is replacing email, and social media is essentially another form of electronic evidence, why would social media not be part of the integral document retention/expiry procedures within an organization?

Content-based monitoring and archiving is possible with technology available today, as the financial sector has demonstrated. Debbi Corej, who is a compliance expert for the financial sector and has successfully implemented an intensive social media program, says it perfectly: “How do you get to yes? Yes you can use social media, but in a compliant way.” The answer can be found at LegalTech New York – January 30 @ 2:00pm.

It’s not too late to make information governance part of the corporate 2012 resolution list.  The reason is pretty simple – most companies need to get out of the reactive firefighting of eDiscovery given the risks of sloppy work, inadvertent productions and looming sanctions.  Yet, so many are caught up in the fog of eDiscovery war that they’ve failed to see the nexus between the upstream, proactive good data management hygiene and the downstream eDiscovery chaos.

In many cases the root cause is the disconnect between differing functional groups (Legal, IT, Information Security, Records Management, etc.).  This is where the emerging umbrella concept of Information Governance comes to play, serving as a way to tackle these information risks along a unified front. Gartner defines information governanceas the:

“specification of decision rights, and an accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archiving and deletion of information, … [including] the processes, roles, standards, and metrics that ensure the effective and efficient use of information to enable an organization to achieve its goals.”

Perhaps more simply put, what were once a number of distinct disciplines—records management, data privacy, information security and eDiscovery—are rapidly coming together in ways that are important to those concerned with mitigating and managing information risk. This new information governance landscape is comprised of a number of formerly discrete categories:

• Regulatory Risks – Whether an organization is in a heavily regulated vertical or not, there are a host of regulations that an organization must navigate to successfully stay in compliance.  In the United States these include a range of disparate regimes, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPPA, the Securities and Exchange Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and other specialized regulations – any number of which require information to be kept in a prescribed fashion, for specified periods of time.  Failure to turn over information when requested by regulators can have dramatic financial consequences, as well as negative impacts to an organization’s reputation.

• Discovery Risks – Under the discovery realm there are any number of potential risks as a company moves along the EDRM spectrum (i.e., Identification, Preservation, Collection, Processing, Analysis, Review and Production), but the most lethal risk is typically associated with spoliation sanctions that arise from the failure to adequately preserve electronically stored information (ESI).  There have been literally hundreds of cases where both plaintiffs and defendants have been caught in the judicial crosshairs, resulting in penalties ranging from outright case dismissal to monetary sanctions in the millions of dollars, simply for failing to preserve data properly.  It is in this discovery arena that the failure to dispose of corporate information, where possible, rears its ugly head since the eDiscovery burden is commensurate with the amount of data that needs to be preserved, processed and reviewed.  Some statistics show that it can cost as much as $5 per document just to have an attorney privilege review performed.  And, with every gigabyte containing upwards of 75,000 pages, it is easy to see massive discovery liability when an organization has terabytes and even petabytes of extraneous data lying around.

• Privacy Risks – Even though the US has a relatively lax information privacy climate there are any number of laws that require companies to notify customers if their personally identifiable information (PII) such as credit card, social security, or credit numbers have been compromised.  For example, California’s data breach notification law (SB1386) mandates that all subject companies must provide notification if there is a security breach to the electronic database containing PII of any California resident.  It is easy to see how unmanaged PII can increase corporate risk, especially as data moves beyond US borders to the international stage where privacy regimes are much more staunch.

• Information Security Risks – Data breaches have become so commonplace that the loss/theft of intellectual property has become an issue for every company, small and large, both domestically and internationally.  The cost to businesses of unintentionally exposing corporate information climbed 7 percent last year to over $7 million per incident.  Recently senators asked the SEC to “issue guidance regarding disclosure of information security risk, including material network breaches” since “securities law obligates the disclosure of any material network breach, including breaches involving sensitive corporate information that could be used by an adversary to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace, affect corporate earnings, and potentially reduce market share.”  The senators cited a 2009 survey that concluded that 38% of Fortune 500 companies made a “significant oversight” by not mentioning data security exposures in their public filings.

Information governance as an umbrella concept helps organizations to create better alignment between functional groups as they attempt to solve these complex and interrelated data risk challenges.  This coordination is even more critical given the way that corporate data is proliferating and migrating beyond the firewall.  With even more data located in the cloud and on mobile devices a key mandate is managing data in all types of form factors. A great first step is to determine ownership of a consolidated information governance approach where the owner can:

• Get C-Level buy-in
• Have the organizational savvy to obtain budget
• Be able to define “reasonable” information governance efforts, which requires both legal and IT input
• Have strong leadership and consensus building skills, because all stakeholders need to be on the same page
• Understand the nuances of their business, since an overly rigid process will cause employees to work around the policies and procedures

Next, tap into and then leverage IT or information security budgets for archiving, compliance and storage.  In most progressive organizations there are likely ongoing projects that can be successfully massaged into a larger information governance play.  A great place to focus on initially is information archiving, since this one of the simplest steps an organization can take to improve their information governance hygiene.  With an archive organizations can systematically index, classify and retain information and thus establish a proactive approach to data management.  It’s this ability to apply retention and (most importantly) expiration policies that allows organizations to start reducing the upstream data deluge that will inevitably impact downstream eDiscovery processes.

Once an archive is in place, the next logical step is to couple a scalable, reactive eDiscovery process with the upstream data sources, which will axiomatically include email, but increasingly should encompass cloud content, social media, unstructured data, etc.  It is important to make sure  that a given  archive has been tested to ensure compatibility with the chosen eDiscovery application to guarantee that it can collect content at scale in the same manner used to collect from other data sources.  Overlaying both of these foundational pieces should be the ability to place content on legal hold, whether that content exists in the archive or not.

As we enter 2012, there is no doubt that information governance should be an element in building an enterprise’s information architecture.  And, different from fleeting weight loss resolutions, savvy organizations should vow to get ahead of the burgeoning categories of information risk by fully embracing their commitment to integrated information governance.  And yet, this resolution doesn’t need to encompass every possible element of information governance.  Instead, it’s best to put foundational pieces into place and then build the rest of the infrastructure in methodical and modular fashion.

Particular pain points for the government traditionally include retention, search, collection, review and production of vast amounts of data and records.  Specifically, these pain points include examples of: FOIA requests gone awry, the issuance of legal holds across different agencies leading to spoliation, and the ever present problem of decentralization.

Why is the government different?

Old Practices. First, in some instances the government is technologically behind (its corporate counterparts) and is failing to meet the judiciary’s expectation that organizations effectively store, manage and discover their information.  This failing is self-evident via  the directive coming from the President mandating that these agencies start to get a plan to attack this problem.  Though different than other corporate entities, the government is nevertheless held to the same standards of eDiscovery under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP).  In practice, the government has been given more leniency until recently, and while equal expectations have not always been the case, the gap between the private and public sectors in no longer possible to ignore.

FOIA.  The government’s arduous obligation to produce information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has no corresponding analog for private organizations, who are responding to more traditional civil discovery requests.  Because the government is so large with many disparate IT systems, it is cumbersome to work efficiently through the information governance process across agencies and many times still difficult inside one individual agency with multiple divisions.  Executing this production process is even more difficult if not impossible to do manually without properly deployed technology.  Additionally, many of the investigatory agencies that issue requests to the private sector need more efficient ways to manage and review data they are requesting.  To compound problems, within the US government there are two opposing interests are at play; both screaming for a resolution, and that solution needs to be centralized.  On the one hand, the government needs to retain more than a corporation may need to in order to satisfy a FOIA request.

Titan Pulled at Both Ends. On the other hand, without classification of the records that are to be kept, technology to organize this vast amount of data and some amount of expiry, every agency will essentially become their own massive repository.  The “retain everything mentality” coupled with the inefficient search and retrieval of data and records is where they stand today.  Corporations are experiencing this on a smaller scale today and many are collectively further along than the government in this process, without the FOIA complications.

What are agencies doing to address these mandates?

In their plans, agencies must describe how they will improve or maintain their records management programs, particularly with regard to email, social media and other electronic communications.  They must also move away from such a paper-centric existence.  eDiscovery consultants and software companies are helping agencies through this process, essentially writing their plans to match the President’s directive.  The cloud conversation has been revisited, and agencies also have to explain how they will use cloud-based services and storage solutions, as well as identify gaps in existing laws or regulations that presently prevent improved management.  Small innovations are taking place.  In fact, just recently the DOJ added a new search feature on their website to make it easier for the public to find documents that have been posted by agencies on their websites.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and Justice Department will use those reports to come up with a government-wide records management framework that is more efficient, maintains accountability by documenting agency actions and promotes “appropriate” public access to records.  Hopefully, the framework they come up with will be centralized and workable on a realistic timeframe with resources sufficiently allocated to the initiative.

How much will this cost?

The President’s mandate is a great initiative and very necessary, but one cannot help but think about the costs in terms of money, time and resources when considering these crucial changes.  The most recent version of a financial services and general government appropriations bill in the Senate extends $378.8 million to NARA for this initiative.  President Obama appointed Steven VanRoekel as the United States CIO in August 2011 to succeed Vivek Kundra.  After VanRoekel’s speech at the Churchill Club in October of 2011, an audience member asked him what the most surprising aspect of his new job was.  VanRoekel said that it was managing the huge and sometimes unwieldy resources of his $80 billion budget.  It is going to take even more than this to do the job right, however.

Using conservative estimates, assume for an agency to implement archiving and eDiscovery capabilities as an initial investment would be $100 million.  That approximates $480 billion for all 480 agencies.  Assume a uniform information governance platform gets adopted by all agencies at a 50% discount due to the large contracts and also factoring in smaller sums for agencies with lesser needs.  The total now comes to $240 billion.  For context, that figure is 5% of what was spent by Federal Government ($4.76 trillion) on the biggest bailout in history in 2008. That leaves a need for $160 billion more to get the job done. VanRoekel also commented at the same meeting that he wants to break down massive multi-year information technology projects into smaller, more modular projects in the hopes of saving the government from getting mired in multi-million dollar failures.   His solution to this, he says, is modular and incremental deployment.

While Rome was not built in a day, this initiative is long overdue, yet feasible, as technology exists to address these challenges rather quickly.  After these 240 days are complete and a plan is drawn the real question is, how are we going to pay now for technology the government needed yesterday?  In a perfect world, the government would select a platform for archiving and eDiscovery, break the project into incremental milestones and roll out a uniform combination of solutions that are best of breed in their expertise.

Issuing a Timely and Comprehensive Litigation Hold

Case: E.I. du Pont de Nemours v. Kolon Industries (E.D. Va. July 21, 2011)

Summary: The court issued a stiff rebuke against defendant Kolon Industries for failing to issue a timely and proper litigation hold.  That rebuke came in the form of an instruction to the jury that Kolon executives and employees destroyed key evidence after the company’s preservation duty was triggered.  The jury responded by returning a stunning $919 million verdict for DuPont.

The spoliation at issue occurred when several Kolon executives and employees deleted thousands emails and other records relevant to DuPont’s trade secret claims.  The court laid the blame for this destruction on the company’s attorneys and executives, reasoning they could have prevented the spoliation through an effective litigation hold process.  At issue were three hold notices circulated to the key players and data sources.  The notices were all deficient in some manner.  They were either too limited in their distribution, ineffective since they were prepared in English for Korean-speaking employees, or too late to prevent or otherwise ameliorate the spoliation.

The Lessons for 2012: The DuPont case underscores the importance of issuing a timely and comprehensive litigation hold notice.  As DuPont teaches, organizations should identify what key players and data sources may have relevant information.  A comprehensive notice should then be prepared to communicate the precise hold instructions in an intelligible fashion.  Finally, the hold should be circulated immediately to prevent data loss.

Organizations should also consider deploying the latest technologies to help effectuate this process.  This includes an eDiscovery platform that enables automated legal hold acknowledgements.  Such technology will allow custodians to be promptly and properly apprised of litigation and thereby retain information that might otherwise have been discarded.

Another Must-Read Case: Haraburda v. Arcelor Mittal U.S.A., Inc. (D. Ind. June 28, 2011)

Suspending Document Retention Policies

Case: Viramontes v. U.S. Bancorp (N.D. Ill. Jan. 27, 2011)

Summary: The defendant bank defeated a sanctions motion because it modified aspects of its email retention policy once it was aware litigation was reasonably foreseeable.  The bank implemented a retention policy that kept emails for 90 days, after which the emails were overwritten and destroyed.  The bank also promulgated a course of action whereby the retention policy would be promptly suspended on the occurrence of litigation or other triggering event.  This way, the bank could establish the reasonableness of its policy in litigation.  Because the bank followed that procedure in good faith, it was protected from court sanctions under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 37(e) “safe harbor.”

The Lesson for 2012: As Viramontes shows, an organization can be prepared for eDiscovery disputes by timely suspending aspects of its document retention policies.  By modifying retention policies when so required, an organization can develop a defensible retention procedure and be protected from court sanctions under Rule 37(e).

Coupling those procedures with archiving software will only enhance an organization’s eDiscovery preparations.  Effective archiving software will have a litigation hold mechanism, which enables an organization to suspend automated retention rules.  This will better ensure that data subject to a preservation duty is actually retained.

Another Must-Read Case: Micron Technology, Inc. v. Rambus Inc., 645 F.3d 1311 (Fed. Cir. 2011)

Managing the Document Collection Process

Case: Northington v. H & M International (N.D.Ill. Jan. 12, 2011)

Summary: The court issued an adverse inference jury instruction against a company that destroyed relevant emails and other data.  The spoliation occurred in large part because legal and IT were not involved in the collection process.  For example, counsel was not actively engaged in the critical steps of preservation, identification or collection of electronically stored information (ESI).  Nor was IT brought into the picture until 15 months after the preservation duty was triggered. By that time, rank and file employees – some of whom were accused by the plaintiff of harassment – stepped into this vacuum and conducted the collection process without meaningful oversight.  Predictably, key documents were never found and the court had little choice but to promise to inform the jury that the company destroyed evidence.

The Lesson for 2012: An organization does not have to suffer the same fate as the company in the Northington case.  It can take charge of its data during litigation through cooperative governance between legal and IT.  After issuing a timely and effective litigation hold, legal should typically involve IT in the collection process.  Legal should rely on IT to help identify all data sources – servers, systems and custodians – that likely contain relevant information.  IT will also be instrumental in preserving and collecting that data for subsequent review and analysis by legal.  By working together in a top-down fashion, organizations can better ensure that their eDiscovery process is defensible and not fatally flawed.

Another Must-Read Case: Green v. Blitz U.S.A., Inc. (E.D. Tex. Mar. 1, 2011)

Using Proportionality to Dictate the Scope of Permissible Discovery

Case: DCG Systems v. Checkpoint Technologies (N.D. Ca. Nov. 2, 2011)

The court adopted the new Model Order on E-Discovery in Patent Cases recently promulgated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.  The model order incorporates principles of proportionality to reduce the production of email in patent litigation.  In adopting the order, the court explained that email productions should be scaled back since email is infrequently introduced as evidence at trial.  As a result, email production requests will be restricted to five search terms and may only span a defined set of five custodians.  Furthermore, email discovery in DCG Systems will wait until after the parties complete discovery on the “core documentation” concerning the patent, the accused product and prior art.

The Lesson for 2012: Courts seem to be slowly moving toward a system that incorporates proportionality as the touchstone for eDiscovery.  This is occurring beyond the field of patent litigation, as evidenced by other recent cases.  Even the State of Utah has gotten in on the act, revising its version of Rule 26 to require that all discovery meet the standards of proportionality.  While there are undoubtedly deviations from this trend (e.g., Pippins v. KPMG (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 7, 2011)), the clear lesson is that discovery should comply with the cost cutting mandate of Federal Rule 1.

Another Must-Read Case: Omni Laboratories Inc. v. Eden Energy Ltd [2011] EWHC 2169 (TCC) (29 July 2011)

Leveraging eDiscovery Technologies for Search and Review

Case: Oracle America v. Google (N.D. Ca. Oct. 20, 2011)

The court ordered Google to produce an email that it previously withheld on attorney client privilege grounds.  While the email’s focus on business negotiations vitiated Google’s claim of privilege, that claim was also undermined by Google’s production of eight earlier drafts of the email.  The drafts were produced because they did not contain addressees or the heading “attorney client privilege,” which the sender later inserted into the final email draft.  Because those details were absent from the earlier drafts, Google’s “electronic scanning mechanisms did not catch those drafts before production.”

The Lesson for 2012: Organizations need to leverage next generation, robust technology to support the document production process in discovery.  Tools such as email analytical software, which can isolate drafts and offer to remove them from production, are needed to address complex production issues.  Other technological capabilities, such as Near Duplicate Identification, can also help identify draft materials and marry them up with finals that have been marked as privileged.  Last but not least, technology assisted review has the potential of enabling one lawyer to efficiently complete the work that previously took thousands of hours.  Finding the budget and doing the research to obtain the right tools for the enterprise should be a priority for organizations in 2012.

Another Must-Read Case: J-M Manufacturing v. McDermott, Will & Emery (CA Super. Jun. 2, 2011)

Conclusion

There were any number of other significant cases from 2011 that could have made this list.  We invite you to share your favorites in the comments section or contact us directly with your feedback.

For more on the cases discussed above, watch this video: