A Paralegal’s Role in Electronic Discovery

Tomorrow, I give a presentation to the Houston Chapter of Women in eDiscovery on the Paralegal’s Role in Electronic Discovery.  Hopefully I can convey the collaborative effort betwen paralegals and litigation support and IT in this endeavor.  I am looking forward to the presentation.  If I can figure out who to post the powerpoint I will.  If I’m not able to, you can check out the Women in eDiscovery website in a few weeks and check it out.

email discovery = garbage barge, or storage costs ^

People, we have a new conflict. And I do love a good rumble.

This one’s between the regulatory requirements mandating employers maintain its employees email for a certain number of years, versus the 4th Amendment and the Stored Communications Act (which nobody has bothered to pay attention to anyway), which says that no one but the receiver or sender of the email can access it without permission of the sender.

In Quon vs. Arch Wireliness, the Ninth Circuit has ruled that an employee’s emails and text messages are off limits to the employer if stored on a third-party’s server.

Does this mean that today’s employer can pay to archive its employees’ email in order to remain in compliance with regulatory laws, but never be able to see or access those messages afterwards? Just keep paying the bills until the time clock runs out on the statute requiring their keep? Are emails off limits for discovery purposes in general for civil litigation?

This is sort of analogous to a garbage barge that is always out at sea, with no port to land in. Oooh.

Or the cost of storage is going to go up. I can see a spike in demand here.

Geeze whiz…..

I’ve had this site up for less than a week, and I’ve already had to thwart a spam attack! Someone tried to paste my article on Summation into the Database Manager’s Association blog site. Ha-ha!

Beyond Enterprise 2.0

Okay, today I’d like to help you cross the bridge, to borrow an overtired analogy, so that you might see my point on why we need to jump to the next generation of technologies for reviewing and producing electronic documents for use in civil litigations. The Enterprise has caught onto application gadgets and KM workers’ click click right there next to their sports scores icons or iTunes or Flickr or Facebook shortcuts on their personalized dashboards, and receive the updated work-related info and click click, back it goes in a keystroke, so within a few seconds the pesky little irritating work issue resolved itself and KM worker is back playing games . Am I jealous? Well I wasn’t so spoiled when I was their age. Ok, so we only had 1 game, Pong, back then when the typewriters roamed the earth, but whatever. You can’t discover mashups in Summation and Concordance. You need today’s tech to discover what’s really going on at the Enterprise 2.0.