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Almost every processing effort encounters at least a few exceptions during processing that cannot be handled without some manual intervention (if they can be handled at all). Additionally, certain source types are special cases that routinely require custom work to process. The handling of these exceptions and special cases can affect both project costs and the completeness of your data set.

Broadly speaking, there are four main activities that take place during processing: expansion, extraction and normalization, indexing, and objective culling. In this Part, we will discuss the first three of these activities, review how decisions made during them can affect later discovery activities, and touch on some of the tools commonly used to complete them.

ESI processing for discovery is one of the areas in which legal practitioners need some level of technology competence to fulfill their duty. Although it is often given short shrift compared to the steps that come before it (preservation and collection) and after it (assessment, review, and production), effective processing is critical to the success of those downstream steps and includes a variety of important decisions to make.

Our monthly legal eDiscovery news round-up features the Privacy Shield’s second annual review and an update to an important Sedona commentary, as well as recent cases and new XDD content.

In addition to all of the industry news items on which we have already touched, 2018 brought the usual collection of notable cases. In particular this year, there were interesting cases on spoliation, proportionality, keyword searches, and TAR. Below we review a sampling of the most interesting cases from those four topical areas.

As we noted in the first Part, our review of our monthly news round-ups from 2018 revealed that data privacy issues were one of the two most frequently occurring topics, and challenging source developments were the other. In this Part, we review those challenging source developments, including: mobile devices, social media, ephemeral messaging and more.

As we noted in the first Part, our review of our monthly news round-ups from 2018 revealed that data privacy issues were one of the two most frequently occurring topics. In this Part, we review those data privacy developments, including: the advent of the GDPR and its challenges, the second review of the EU-US Privacy Shield, and new state-level data privacy laws in the US.

This year has been a dramatic one in every sense of the word, including in eDiscovery. Throughout the year, XDD has been rounding up industry news, noteworthy cases, and more in our monthly “Because You Need to Know” posts, and to finish out the year, we have put together a special year-in-review article series and webinar program discussing the biggest developments and most interesting cases from across 2018.

Our monthly legal eDiscovery news round-up features Alexa as an evidence source, data privacy concerns and impacts, and mobile device and wearable tech sources, as well as recent cases and new XDD content.

The first five of California’s requirements for fulfilling a lawyer’s duty of technology competence for eDiscovery all pertained to the initial steps that must be taken at the very beginning of a new matter, even before formal discovery has begun. The remaining four requirements all pertain to successfully completing actual discovery, including negotiation, collection, search and production of ESI.

California promulgated Formal Opinion No. 2015-193 in 2015, which established a duty of technology competence for eDiscovery and identified nine specific requirements for fulfilling that duty, which have been widely discussed as a useful model for all attorneys. The first five of those requirements all pertain to the initial steps that must be taken at the very beginning of a new matter, even before formal discovery has begun.

In discovery specifically, and in legal practice generally, the role of electronically-stored information (ESI) and new technology has grown exponentially over the past decade. As a result, it has become a practical reality that effective legal practice and effective discovery requires some level of technology literacy and competence, and since 2012, that practical reality has been slowly transforming into a formal requirement.