e-discovery 2.0

There’s a lot of excitement (and corresponding uncertainty) about the recent passing of Federal Rule of Evidence 502 (FRE 502), which was signed into law on Sept 19th.  The main reason that the legal community is excited about FRE 502 is because of the potential for cost savings by reducing the amount of money associated with the e-discovery review process, which is routinely viewed as the most expensive area in the entire e-discovery process.

In combination with the codification of a national standard to determine when a privilege has been waived, FRE 502 is primarily designed to make the use of claw-back agreements a truly viable prospect when doing e-discovery privilege review.  It should provide some panacea (ideally) for rapidly escalating e-discovery costs.  Or, at least that was the impetus behind the rule’s creation - according to the Comments:

“The proposed new rule facilitates discovery and reduces privilege-review costs by limiting the circumstances under which the privilege or protection is forfeited, which may happen if the privileged or protected information or material is produced in discovery. The burden and cost of steps to preserve the privileged status of attorney-client information and trial preparation materials can be enormous. Under present practices, lawyers and firms must thoroughly review everything in a client’s possession before responding to discovery requests. Otherwise they risk waiving the privileged status not only of the individual item disclosed but of all other items dealing with the same subject matter. This burden is particularly onerous when the discovery consists of massive amounts of electronically stored information.”

In short, FRE 502 is designed to establish uniform, nationwide standards for waiver of attorney-client privilege and work product protection, with the main goal being to protect producing parties against the inadvertent disclosure of privileged materials or work product in either federal or state proceedings.  The salient section is subsection (b) which states that when a disclosure of privileged information is made in a federal proceeding or to a federal agency, the disclosure does not constitute a waiver if:

1. the disclosure is inadvertent;
2. the holder of the privilege or protection took reasonable steps to prevent disclosure; and
3. the holder promptly took reasonable steps to rectify the error, including (if applicable) following Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(5)(B).

The end game here is presumably to increasingly leverage automated review methodologies to save costs.  But, in order to facilitate this type of review methodology without taking on unhealthy levels of risk means that claw-back provisions must be as airtight at possible to prevent inadvertent electronically stored information (ESI) productions.  And yet, exactly how FRE 502 will work in practice is up to debate since there isn’t any case law interpreting it yet.

One area that’s top of mind is how this new Rule will impact the recent decisions on e-discovery search, including the Victor Stanley case authored by Chief Magistrate Judge Grimm.  Since FRE 502 contains a core “reasonableness” prong in section (b) it’s likely that Grimm’s proclamation about e-discovery search will still be controlling.  Grimm fundamentally had to evaluate whether the producing party’s search protocols and procedures were in fact reasonable.

“Defendants, who bear the burden of proving that their conduct was reasonable for purposes of assessing whether they waived attorney-client privilege by producing the 165 documents to the Plaintiff, have failed to provide the court with information regarding: the keywords used; the rationale for their selection; the qualifications of M. Pappas and his attorneys to design an effective and reliable search and information retrieval method; whether the search was a simple keyword search, or a more sophisticated one, such as one employing Boolean proximity operators; or whether they analyzed the results of the search to assess its reliability, appropriateness for the task, and the quality of its implementation.” (footnotes omitted).

In Victor Stanley, the producing party wasn’t able to demonstrate reasonableness because they didn’t strategically craft out their strategy nor conduct any sampling to make sure that the e-discovery search worked as designed.  This type of analysis would still seem to come into play under FRE 502 and so, as Grimm states, the use of either a best practices or collaborative approach to e-discovery would seem to be as important as ever.

Given that backdrop it’s just as important as ever that parties “show their work” when it comes to e-discovery search.   Whether FRE 502 will really make parties feel safe enough to use automated review processes (thereby reducing costs) will remain to be seen.  But, this first step which unifies standards and expectations is at least a very positive step.

In Judge Grimm’s recent opinion, Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe, Inc., 2008 WL 2221841 (D. Md. May 29, 2008), he does a lot to instill fear into foolhardy attorneys who attempt to structure their own keyword searches for e-discovery, again quoting Equity Analytics:

“[F]or lawyers and judges to dare opine that a certain search term or terms would be more likely to produce information than the terms that were used is truly to go where angels fear to tread.”

And, while I agree with this sentiment, the notion of angels treading sounds a bit like a Christian rock band. But, I digress… on to the significance of this opinion.

First of all, it comes from Chief United States Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm, a noted e-discovery jurist, who’s authored a number of significant opinions in this area, including Hobson and Thompson. Here, in Victor Stanley, he also gets the award for footnote of the decade: Footnote 10, which is so chockablock with relevant nuggets that I thought I’d dedicate an entire post to his riveting dicta.

Judge Grimm’s entire opinion is quite lengthy (43 pages) so a summary is dangerous, but the central issue in Victor Stanley revolved around whether the defendants, who’d inadvertently produced 165 privileged electronic documents, could get them back, in the absence of a valid clawback provision. The plaintiff’s contention was that defendants waived privilege because they failed to take reasonable precautions by performing a faulty review of text-searchable files that were part of defendants’ electronically stored information (ESI) production.

In order to evaluate the reasonableness of defendants’ privilege review methodology, Judge Grimm honed in on defendant’s use of keyword search techniques. Quoting In re Seroquel, O’Keefe and Equity Analytics, Grimm used the bulk of footnote 10 to expand on this core thesis:

(”[D]etermining whether a particular search methodology, such as keywords, will or will not be effective certainly requires knowledge beyond the ken of a lay person (and a lay lawyer) . . . .”);

And, while the implications of this expert oriented approach are controversial, this much should be eminently clear to practitioners (in cascading order of obviousness):

• Discovery, except in the most bizarre case, will always involve some measure of ESI.
• ESI is proliferating both in types (blogs, databases, VOIP, IM, text messaging, etc.) and volume (multi-terabyte cases are now common).
• Even the most basic search techniques (keyword, Boolean, etc.) are required to manage exploding data volumes. But, according to Judge Grimm, in order to have a keyword search pass judicial muster one of the following two scenarios must occur:

1. Collaborative Search Approach: The parties, presumably as part of the meet and confer process must “confer with their opposing party in an effort to identify a mutually agreeable search and retrieval method. This minimizes cost because if the method is approved, there will be no dispute resolving its sufficiency, and doing it right the first time is always cheaper than doing it over if ordered to do so by the court.” I like to call this the “measure twice, cut once” method.Or, alternatively:
2. Best Practices & Data Driven Search Approach: In order to have a defensible methodology in the absence of collaboration a party needs to:a) “be aware of literature describing the strengths and weaknesses of various methodologies, such as The Sedona Conference Best Practices,…. and select the one that they believe is most appropriate for its intended task.”b) And, if their selection is challenged, then they should expect to support their position with “affidavits or other equivalent information from persons with the requisite qualifications and experience, based on sufficient facts or data and using reliable principles or methodology.”c) Finally, they should do appropriate levels of data sampling and quality assurance to test core search assumptions.

Failure to adhere to this articulate standard is an invitation for disaster:

“Use of search and information retrieval methodology,…, requires the utmost care in selecting methodology that is appropriate for the task because the consequence of failing to do so, … , may be the disclosure of privileged/protected information to an adverse party, resulting in a determination by the court that the privilege/protection has been waived.”

So, while it’s not my intent to be overly dramatic, I think we are seeing a sea change in how search is performed in practice. It used to be de rigueur for attorneys to run solo with their search protocols. But, it’s not safe to take that path any longer. Now, counsel faces a fork in the road where they can either collaborate on their search protocols or be prepared to get called to the carpet if the opposition wants to make a fuss. This might turn out to be yet another “case within a case” situation similar to how the plaintiffs’ bar has made hay by arguing about spoliation in some instances where they didn’t have much on the merits. If that happens having a defensible process, and perhaps an expert and supporting statistics will go a long way towards preventing a catastrophic privilege waiver.