news and knowledge from around the globe compiled by Global EDD Group
You probably are aware that SharePoint is a great fit for most organizations document management and collaboration needs. What about social computing? SharePoint gives you a good starting point. What do you do when SharePoint falls short? Here are 8 ways companies can extend SharePoint’s out-of-the-box capabilities to better fit their social computing vision.
via 8 Ways to Use SharePoint for Social Computing – Digital Landfill.
The costs of civil discovery in the computer age appear to be prompting divergent responses by the federal and New York state courts. These differences, which are still evolving, could have significant implications for litigants and lawmakers.
Litigants with a choice of forum should consider these differences in selecting which court system best suits their objectives. And lawmakers should monitor these differences to assess what rules best reconcile the often competing goals of ready access to the civil justice system, full development of the facts relevant to the case, and the efficient, cost-effective resolution of the parties' dispute.
The costs of electronic discovery are well-known and have received ample coverage throughout this decade, in this publication and others.1 The source of these costs is society's increasing reliance on the electronic creation, transmission and retention of information, especially in the corporate context. Because information is so easily created, kept and copied, the volume that is available and potentially relevant to a dispute had ballooned geometrically.
While these costs can be somewhat controlled by the creative use of technology and counsel's use of sound management principles in managing a document review, there are limits. The application of classic liberal discovery principles can still require the production of hundreds of thousands or even millions of “documents,” where in the past the same case would have involved discovery into a small fraction of that number.
Read more @ The New York Law Journal – Free: Two Roads Diverge in Managing E-Discovery Costs.
“Software as a Service” (SaaS) providers such as Google, IBM, Cisco and others are offering multinational corporations the opportunity to replace their enormously expensive and ever changing technological infrastructure with SaaS computing facilities. Individual companies would archive and access information in these systems through the internet at a presumably lower unit price (cloud computing). These providers also promise to manage the skyrocketing costs of collecting and disclosing electronically stored information (ESI), especially emails, demanded in U.S. judicial and regulatory proceedings (e-discovery).
Since these repositories are not under the control of the company being sued, they argue that the very strong policy and procedure, audit trails and reliability in the “cloud” are a vast improvement over a company’s internal procedures. However, international cross-border e-discovery issues threaten to rain on the cloud computing parade. The SaaS provider, the multinational corporation and their attorneys must carefully address and anticipate these e-discovery issues early in their discussions or risk costly sanctions. Moreover, litigation counsel cannot be surprised to learn that all of the company’s ESI is outside of the company’s control.
Civil code countries, such as France and Germany, take dramatically different approaches to cross-border information transfer than does the U.S. The U.S. requires parties in any litigation to exchange information which “may” lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. Issues of confidentiality and privacy are dealt with through various devices such as protective orders and confidentiality agreements. This is not true for many European and Asian countries where U.S. type discovery is rare and broad data protection and privacy rights are enforced by the state and are not negotiable by an employer. For example, “processing,” includes a company’s operations relating to collecting, storing, retrieving, disclosing and transmitting personal data and includes any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person. Countries have introduced laws (”blocking statutes”) to restrict cross-border disclosure of information to foreign jurisdictions. See generally, “The Sedona Conference Framework for analysis of cross border discovery conflicts-A practical guide to navigating the competing currents of international data privacy and discovery” .
Read more via Project Counsel » Blog Archive » International Cloud Computing Meets U.S. E-Discovery.
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Judge Lee Rosenthal gave the keynote titled Is the E-discovery Process Broken, &, If So, Can It be Fixed?
Judge Rosenthal’s opening address set the table for the rest of the 2-day conference. There were so many notable comments she made but here are are a few:
- a litigation survey showed only 5% of the parties had used data sampling
- sixty percent of corporations did not have any litigation holds, which can be dangerous
- the two important recent cases on e-discovery are Twomley and Iqbal
- there has been a lack of success of District Court Judges to control discovery
- proportionality is in the national debate and an adequate set of controls need to be applied to achieve proportionality. This was the mantra repeated throughout the 2-days of the conference
- The Sedona Conference Proclamation of Co-operation is a good starting point for collaborative e-discovery
. Effective e-discovery should include a reasonable cost component. The ACLS and IALAS report discusses 29 principles to promote effective e-discovery including early identification of issues and better control to contain costs, fact based pleading, narrow requests for production, more early discussion and more judge involvement
- Rule 16 helps expedite discovery and contains items for courts to narrow litigation including active judicial management. Rule 16 and 26(f) are notably underused
Potential fixes for the system: there are several pilot programs currently being conducted, notably one in the 7th circuit with the goal of incentivizing early discussion and e-discovery being resolved as an example of Rule 26(f) information sharing and co-operation.
Local rules are not good and a problem because they vary and one size does not fit all.
And the big take-away: the judges are in a good position to take a long look at e-discovery in May 2010 at the Duke University conference where the FRCP Rules committee will revisit judicial involvement and settlement issues.
via Live from the Georgetown Law Advanced E-Discovery Institute: some thoughts on Day 1 – The Posse List.
Yesterday, when we discussed the $1.25 billion AMD-Intel settlement, we wrote that OMelveny & Meyers partner Chuck Diamond, who represents AMD, suggested that one factor that may have prompted Intel to settle was a recent discovery sanction motion filed October 14 by his client. An Intel spokesman told us this wasn't the case. Still, we took some time to read that motion, along with a countervailing sanction motion by Intel, and thought they were worth some discussion. (Note: The two motions are heavily redacted in parts.) In particular, AMD's motion raised some serious claims about Intel's widespread destruction of emails that could have made the company nervous.
According to AMD's motion–which, we might add, is exceptionally well written–Intel “probably” destroyed more than one million emails because it continued to use an automatic delete function on its email system after AMD sued it in June 2005. The O'Melveny lawyers describe Intel's system as a “move-it-or-lose-it” regime, in which incoming emails were automatically and permanently “vaporized” in as little as thirty-five days, sent items disappeared after seven days, and deleted items after one day. The document loss was “catastrophic,” surpassing by hundreds of thousands of documents the destruction of evidence in any case ever reported, according to O'Melveny. And even though Intel attempted to correct the problem through extensive remediation, O'Melveny claimed, “hundreds of thousands of relevant documents have gone permanently missing.”
O'Melveny also claimed that for more than a year and a half, “Intel and its lawyers did nothing to stop the destruction despite repeated red flags that they chose to ignore.” As a result of this willful and bad faith destruction of evidence, the firm maintained, “Intel has severely and irreparably harmed AMD’s ability to present its case.” The lawyers asked the court to allow the jury to be told about this document destruction, and give the jury an adverse inference instruction that it may presume that the destroyed documents would have been favorable to AMD's case.
via Prelude to a Settlement? Analyzing the AMD-Intel Sanction Motions.
On November 10, Senator Dodd released a discussion draft of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2009 (the “Senate Proposal”).1 On October 27, the House Financial Services Committee released a discussion draft of the Financial Stability and Improvement Act of 2009 (the “House Proposal”).2 Subtitle D of Title IX of the Senate Proposal (the “Senate ABS Proposal”) and Subtitle F of the House Proposal (also referred to as the Credit Risk Retention Act of 2009) relate specifically to asset-backed securitization reform (the “House ABS Proposal,” and together with the Senate ABS Proposal, the “ABS Proposals”). The ABS Proposals would amend applicable banking regulations and federal securities laws to provide for issuer credit risk retention and more transparent credit risk reporting associated with asset-backed securities. Although the ABS Proposals are based on the proposed legislation submitted to Congress by the Obama Administration in July (the “Obama Proposal”), there are some important differences between the bills which are discussed in more detail below.
Please link below for more information.
via JD Supra: Legal Articles – The Latest Proposals for Securitization Reform.
A small startup company called InfoChimps released for sale yesterday three very large sets of data extracted from 500 million Twitter messages. Included in the offering are the senders and recipients of 1 billion @ messages, Retweets and Favorites. We wrote in-depth about the release late last night. This morning we interviewed Iain Dodsworth, creator of the most popular Twitter client, TweetDeck, about the value he might find in that data and the direction he’s aiming to take TweetDeck in the future.
read more: Twitter Data & the Future of TweetDeck .
Self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees will be brought to trial in a civilian U.S. courthouse in New York, near the site of the devastating 2001 terror attacks. Prosecutors expect to seek the death penalty.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced the long-awaited and politically fraught decision at a news conference Friday. He also said five other Guantanamo detainees, including a major suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, will be tried through the military commission process.
Holder said the Sept. 11 defendants should be tried where their crimes occurred. Nearly 3,000 people died when the World Trade Center towers were brought down by two hijacked jetliners, another hijacked jet hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in the state of Pennsylvania.
“After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for that attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice,” Holder said. “They will be brought to New York to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.”
Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in President Barack Obama’s plan to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Obama initially planned to close the center by Jan. 22, but the administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.
“For over 200 years our nation has relied upon a faithful adherence to the rule of law,” Holder told a news conference at the Justice Department. “Once again, we will ask our legal system in two venues to answer that call.”
via Law.com – Sept. 11 Mastermind, Four Other Detainees to Face Death Penalty in New York Trial.
Baker Hostetler, which was founded in Cleveland almost a century ago, landed in Chicago this week. The firm’s new office opens with four lawyers, including three that it nabbed from Lovells and McDermott Will & Emery.
Baker Hostetler is leasing a floor of office space from Drinker Biddle & Reath that can accommodate 24 lawyers, with an option to expand the space to add 10 more lawyers later. Ultimately, the firm expects to have 100 attorneys in the city, said Steven Kestner, Baker’s national executive partner.
“We’re not going to be in a rush to do this,” Kestner said. “It might happen quickly. It might be a number of years.”
The firm, which now has about 600 lawyers nationwide in 11 offices, already has major clients in the city, including Hyatt Corp. and Boeing Co. While the two new partners hired for the office have expertise in corporate finance and commercial litigation, Kestner expects that the firm will bring its other strengths in tax and intellectual property to Chicago as well.
The office will be led by Ronald Okada, a Baker Hostetler partner who moved from Cleveland. Okada, who is the firm’s hiring partner and manages its diversity initiatives, said he will focus on building up the Chicago presence.
via Law.com – Baker Hostetler Hangs Out Its Shingle in Chicago.
