Can anyone doubt the changes wrought by the modern “smart” cellphone?  My new home sits at the corner of one-way streets in New Orleans, my porch a few feet from motorists.  At my former NOLA home, my porch faced cars stopped for a street light.  From my vantage points, I saw drivers looking at their phones, some so engrossed they failed to move when they could.  Phones impact how traffic progresses through controlled intersections in every community.  We are slow-moving zombies in cars.

Distracted driving has eclipsed speeding and drunken driving as the leading cause of motor vehicle collisions.  Walking into fixed objects while texting is reportedly the most common reason young people visit emergency rooms today.  Instances of “distracted walking” injury have doubled every year since 2006.  Doing the math, 250 ER visits in 2006 are over half a million ER visits today, because we walk into poles, doors and parked cars while texting.

Look around you.  CAUTION: This will entail looking up from your phone.  How many are using their phones? At a concert, how many are experiencing it through the lens of their cell phone cameras?  How many selfies?  How many texts?  How many apps?

Lately I’ve begun asking CLE attendees how many are never more than an arm’s length from their phones 24/7.  A majority raise their hands.  These are tech-wary lawyers, and most are Boomers, not Millennials.

Smart phones have changed us.  Litigants are at a turning point in meeting e-discovery duties, and lawyers ignore this sea change at peril.  The “legal industry” has chosen self-deception when it comes to mobile devices. It’s a lie in line with corporate bottom lines, and it once found support in the e-discovery case law and rules of procedure.  But, no more.

Today, if you fail to advise clients to preserve relevant and unique mobile data when under a preservation duty, you’re committing malpractice. 

Yes, I used the “M” word, and not lightly. Continue reading →

I’m livid about FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the Huma Abdein e-mails. “Reckless” doesn’t begin to describe Comey’s self-indulgent decision to release information about a situation he clearly does not yet grasp, in a manner that elevates Jim Comey above longstanding Justice Department policy and the integrity of a Presidential election.  Mr. Comey’s justification is couched entirely in his personal predilections, not those of the Bureau or Justice.  It is all “I, I, I” and none of  “we the Bureau” or “we the Justice Department.”  Mine is a procedural objection, not a political one. Whatever my glee at seeing Trump exposed for the weasel I know him to be, I would be every bit as critical had Comey’s half-baked announcement concerned Trump’s e-mail as Clinton’s.  But, Comey’s folly is an opportunity to glean some e-discovery insight.   Continue reading →

In the wee hours last evening, I received a question posed by Angela Bunting with Nuix down in Sydney, Australia.  Angela has such deep knowledge of e-discovery above and below the Equator that I was flattered to be queried by someone I’d go to for guidance.  It was a magnificent hypothetical question.

Angela posited a scenario where a producing party used emerging technolgies to either mechanically translate foreign language text to English or voice recordings to text.   In each instance, the quality of the resultant searchable text was poor, akin to bad OCR, and characterized by poor searchability due to malformed and missing words, misleading substitutions, etc.  As a  consequence of  this poor searchability, some documents that should have been produced were not and, to make matters worse, the requesting party had some of the omitted documents, so could readily demonstrate serious flaws in production.

Challenged by the requesting party, the producing party defends the use of the automated transcription or translation based on proportionality.  To do the same work any other way would have required use of costly and time-consuming manual labor.

So, there you have it: the automated approach was faster and cheaper, but also much less accurate and complete, resulting in a failure to produce non-privileged responsive material.

Angela asked what I believed the view of the courts might be in such a situation?  Would the Court require the work be done again using a more accurate, more expensive method? Might sanctions issue?  Would the Court excuse the failure based on proportionality?

Predicting what courts will do based on skeletal hypotheticals is a crap shoot.  Outcomes turn on the peculiar facts of each case and, when the issue is e-discovery, on counsels’ skill in acquainting the judge with the technical underpinnings.

But, I gave it a shot, and here’s my reply:

Continue reading →

This is a peculiar post in that it’s not an essay with a takeaway so much as a cerebral beach ball tossed to the crowd in hope that readers might enjoy batting it around (in comments below or over cocktails at the next e-discovery confab).  My proposition is that error, particularly inadvertent production occurring as a consequence of human carelessness, is a useful hedge against obstruction. Put another way, producing parties have become so adept at or inured to confounding e-discovery that a producing party’s mistakes are now our main–and perhaps only–means to uncover abuse.  I further posit that, although the shift to technology-assisted review is driven principally by cost savings, its incidental “benefit” to producing parties lies in its ability to stem inadvertent productions serving to reveal discovery abuse.

I concede that’s a cynical proposition, and I dearly wish it weren’t so dour; but, I’ve been litigating for 35 years, a third of that time dedicated to unspooling failed and abusive e-discovery efforts as Special Master.  Judges don’t ask me around to admire discovery efforts done right; I’m invited to disaster areas.  When I was counsel for injured parties in products liability and negligence matters, I lived the grind of forcing opponents to surrender information that helped my clients.  It was never easy; it can shake your faith.

Then and now, opponents fancifully characterized damaging information as privileged or decided that the author of the inculpatory e-mail or memo didn’t really mean what he or she plainly said.  Lawyers and clients will withhold damaging responsive data based on a tortured interpretation of a request or by the slender reed of a boilerplate objections: “Vague!” “Overbroad!” “Unduly burdensome!”  Lawyers have a remarkable capacity to rationalize failures to produce responsive material in discovery.  Continue reading →