Unclear on the Concept

Law Technology News
May 11, 2005

Concept-searching technology, in many an e-discovery vendor's product, allows electronic documents to be found based on the ideas they contain instead of particular words. But how well does it work? In his "Ball in Your Court" column, attorney and forensics specialist Craig Ball notes that the needle-finding tools have improved, but the haystacks are much, much larger now. Are automated search tools performing well enough for us to use them as primary evidence harvesting tools?

The Consequences of 'Zubulake'

The Legal Intelligencer
May 3, 2005

Recently, a jury sitting in federal district court in Manhattan returned a verdict of nearly $29.3 million in a suit that warns of the fate that may await litigants who take electronic discovery missteps. UBS Warburg says it will move to set aside the verdict -- one of the largest awards to an individual discrimination plaintiff ever recorded -- but no matter how that motion is resolved, its electronic discovery experience in Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC will remain a cautionary tale.

E-Discovery and Inevitable Litigation

e-Discovery Law & Strategy
April 28, 2005

The consequences of poorly executed e-discovery can be dire. In cases such as Zubulake V, companies have been punished for failing, in the court's eyes, to preserve electronic evidence properly. The penalties range from the severe (attorney fees) to the extreme -- the entry of default judgment. There are, however, steps you can take before a lawsuit is filed that may improve a company's ability to preserve evidence without unduly burdening day-to-day operations.

Demystifying Deduplication for E-Discovery

Special to Law.com
April 20, 2005

Lawyers who tangle with e-discovery know that a case can involve millions of documents and high costs associated with assessing them -- so how can they narrow the scope of EDD to save effort and money? One method is "deduplication," which refers to identifying and then segregating identical electronic documents based upon the similarity of a mathematical hash value.