In a recent blog I spoke about the need to save all content generated by any type of social media application for litigation purposes. I recently read another article about a lawsuit where the party that produces documents in a lawsuit must pay the costs of eDiscovery even when it requires expensive retrieval of electronic documentation, an appeals court stated. The gist of the suit was in 2009, U.S. Bank sued GreenPoint Mortgage Funding over some $1.8 billion in subprime mortgage-backed securities GreenPoint issued from 2005-06. The lawsuit claimed that GreenPoint committed “gross violations” of the “representations and warranties regarding the attributes of the loans and the practices and policies under which the loans were originated, underwritten and serviced,” according to the ruling. (If you ask me they should pay for the costs.)
“There has been a movement among other courts, where the cost of discovery production is significant, to adopt the standards articulated by the United States District Court in Zubulake and to place the cost of discovery, including searching for, retrieving and producing ESI (electronically stored information), at least initially, on the producing party,” the court wrote.
The cost of litigation for some companies is enormous. Mostly around the subject of finding, identifying, and organizing all the relevant information to support or defend themselves. With the introduction of ESI one would think it would have become easier than manual identification, but with the amount of content that must be sifted through it is still just as hard, if not harder. We do have clients using our technologies for eDiscovery and litigation support but obviously not all firms or companies use it.
If you are in this field, since I am by no means an expert on ESI, please shed some light on your processes and how you deal with this. It would appear to me that this isn’t an area where you can cut costs.
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