Because You Need to Know: Monthly News Round-Up for July 2019

A monthly round-up of industry news stories, useful publications, and notable cases of which you should be aware from the preceding month

Welcome to “Because You Need to Know,” XDD’s monthly news round-up.  In these posts, we gather together interesting articles, noteworthy cases, new publications, and XDD materials from the preceding month.  This post gathers items of interest from July 2019.

Industry News Stories

Interesting topics in the news from July include a new XDD acquisition, new EU/UK data privacy developments, and new US data privacy developments:

• New XDD Acquisition
  • Xact Data Discovery Acquires Fellow E-Discovery Provider QDiscovery

• New EU/UK Data Privacy Developments
  • Privacy Case in Top EU Court Could Upend Trans-Atlantic Data Transfers
  • UK’s Recent GDPR Fines Signal Unified Enforcement Approach With EU

• New US Data Privacy Developments
  • Tech’s Efforts to Diminish Landmark California Privacy Law Fizzle, for Now
  • Facebook’s $5B FTC Fine Ups the Privacy Stakes for All General Counsel

Notable Cases

New eDiscovery cases discussed in July include:

• Court Recommends Finding of Intent to Deprive for Defendant’s Lost Text Messages
• No Proof of Intent to Deprive Means No Adverse Inference Sanction
• Deleted ESI Doesn’t Automatically Mean Sanctions: Two Recent Cases Highlight the Spoliation Thresholds in Rule 37(e)
• Plaintiff Requests His Entire PST File, Court Says No
• Commonwealth v. Fowler: What the Kevin Spacey Cases Mean for E-Discovery and the Law

XDD Materials

In July, XDD published three new blog articles, a new podcast episode, a new practice guide, and a new educational webinar:

• Blog Articles
  • Review Fundamentals Series (ongoing):
    • Part 3 – Who Does the Reviewing
  • Mobile Devices Update Series (ongoing):
    • Part 1 – Data on the Move
    • Part 2 – A Few Recent Cases

• XDD’s First Chair Podcast
  • Episode 03: Mike Gutierrez on Discovery from Slack – Each month, XDD’s First Chair podcast invites one or more guest experts to sit down with XDD Director of Education Matthew Verga, JD, for a 20-30 minute conversation about a single, important eDiscovery topic. In our second episode, XDD Director of Forensic Services Mike Gutierrez discusses what practitioners need to know about preservation and collection in Slack and other cloud-based collaboration tools like it.

• Practice Guide
  • Clearing the Fog of War: ECA Fundamentals – The fog of war is fitting shorthand for the state of uncertainty that exists early in a new legal matter: what are the underlying facts? What evidence might exist?  What are the legal and financial risks?  Early case assessment, fundamentally, is the process of trying to clear some of this fog of uncertainty, but as litigation has evolved in the eDiscovery era, so too has the scope of what’s included in ECA.  In this free twenty-three page Practice Guide, XDD Director of Education Matthew Verga, JD, reviews the fundamentals that legal practitioners need to know about performing effective ECA in the context of eDiscovery.

• Educational Webinar
  • Clearing the Fog of War: ECA Fundamentals – The fog of war is fitting shorthand for the state of uncertainty that exists early in a new legal matter: what are the underlying facts? What evidence might exist?  What are the legal and financial risks?  Early case assessment, fundamentally, is the process of trying to clear some of this fog of uncertainty, but as litigation has evolved in the eDiscovery era, so too has the scope of what’s included in ECA.  In this free one-hour educational webinar, XDD VP of eDiscovery Operations Bill Anderson and XDD Senior Director of Relativity Analytics Paul Laven, review the fundamentals that legal practitioners need to know about performing effective ECA in the context of eDiscovery.

As always, we welcome your input regarding future topics for our webinars, articles, and white papers.  Share your interests with us here.