Litigation Support

Hat tip to Joe Howie for passing along an excellent article which he co-authored with Patrick Oot and Anne Kershaw. The article appears in the January/February 2010 edition of the ACC Docket (the Journal of the Association of Corporate Counsel).

Though it has a broad title, "Ethics and E-Discovery Review" is really focused on the issue of duplicate consolidation. I am only guessing, but I speculate that the title was meant to attract the average lawyer - I can tell you for a fact that most lawyer audiences look at me blankly when I use the term "duplicate consolidation."

The article is extremely well-written and provides an in-depth look at the cost savings that may be achieved through duplicate consolidation. It also suggests something I fear to be all too true, that many lawyers prefer to keep the billable hours up rather than save clients money.

The authors open with quite a punch so I'll quote the first paragraph:

"A recent study published by the Ediscovery Institute based on a survey of leading ediscovery providers (Deduping Survey) shows that, despite the technical ability to suppress or consolidate duplicates within an electronic document population, chances are about 50-50 that your outside counsel fails to take advantage of this technology, opting instead to double-bill for reviewing unnecessary duplicates for privilege, confidentiality and relevance. The study shows that, on average, law firms that do not consolidate duplicates across custodians are reviewing 27 percent more records than needed, and in some cases 60 percent or more, raising serious ethical issues involving conflicts of interest and technical competency."

The opening sure piqued my interest - and the article delivered on the promise of its opening. Well worth reading this one.

E-mail: snelson@senseient.com Phone: 703-359-0700

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