OrcaTec LLC

Quality Assurance and Sampling in eDiscovery: a practical workshop

This workshop has been postponed.
Please contact us if you would like to be informed of its new date.

OrcaTec is hosting a practical workshop on quality assurance and sampling in eDiscovery on February 29, 2008 at the AMA Executive Conference Center in the San Francisco Marriott Hotel. This workshop will provide practical tools for evaluating your eDiscovery process and making it more transparent, no matter what technology you use.

See the brochure.

There is no sign that the exploding volume of electronically stored information is going to let up any time soon. It does not take a Ph.D. to recognize that the cost of dealing with this volume threatens to overwhelm the justice system. Attorneys, consultants, and service providers are all looking for ways to reduce the volume that has to be reviewed for electronic discovery. In most cases these ways involve the use of technology.

The problem with technology, however, is that it can be a mysterious black box, a kind voodoo magic spell. Although some lawyers are willing to trust technology to determine what documents are responsive and which are probably privileged, other attorneys are not so trusting. A larger number are willing to rely on technology for searching, clustering, or culling.

At the same time, the courts seem to be asking for more transparency in the way parties conduct their reviews. In Treppel v. Biovail Corp., 233 F.R.D. 363 (S.D.N.Y. 2006) the court noted that litigants do not have the responsibility look at every scrap of information, but they do have the responsibility to use a reasonably comprehensive search strategy.

Even in a case involving exclusively hard copy documents, there is no obligation on the part of a responding party to examine every scrap of paper in its potentially voluminous files in order to comply with its discovery obligations. Rather, it must conduct a diligent search, which involves developing a reasonably comprehensive search strategy.

In re Seroquel Products Liability Litigation MDL Docket No. 1769, 2007, U.S. Dist. LEXIS 61287, the defendant, Astra Zeneca (AZ), “provided essentially no information as to how it organized its search for relevant material, what steps it took to assure reasonable completeness and quality control.

AZ purported to embrace the requirements of Rule 26 and the Sedona Principles. However, the reality was to the contrary. For example, while key word searching is a recognized method to winnow relevant documents from large repositories, use of this technique must be a cooperative and informed process. Rather than working with Plaintiffs from the outset to reach agreement on appropriate and comprehensive search terms and methods, AZ undertook the task in secret. Common sense dictates that sampling and other quality assurance techniques must be employed to meet requirements of completeness. If AZ took such steps, it has not identified or validated them.

For a related issue see Wingnut Films, Ltd. v Katja Motion Pictures Corp., 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 72953 (C.D. Cal. Sept. 18, 2007). In that case, the court characterized the search for electronic documents as “less than diligent.”

Sampling has long been recognized as an appropriate approach to finding responsive documents (e.g., Sedona Principle 11). This workshop will help you to translate this idea into specific practical actions that can make your electronic discovery process more transparent and more reliable.

Register for the workshop online using Google Checkout and your credit card.

Dec 29, 03:03 AM