Free eDiscovery Podcasts

Why should there be any interest in a free resource on electronic discovery where top experts share their opinions and tips? The reason is the cost of electronic discovery and an ongoing lack of engagement with new tools and best practices. For hundreds of years, discovery in litigation was looking through boxes and reviewing paper documents. At the turn of this century, there was a realization that most information is no longer stored in paper format. The majority of communication is now stored in binary code format because it is created on computers. As a result, the complexity of discovery in litigation increased because most lawyers are not technologists. Many faced difficulties transitioning from paper discovery to electronic discovery.  Consequently, the goal of our educational podcasts is to help “crack the code” of eDiscovery so that best practices become more widely adopted.

To help address the changing discovery landscape, there were new federal rules for electronic discovery passed in December 2006 to provide some guidance.  Influential volunteer think tanks like The Sedona Conference and The Electronic Discovery Reference Model were formed to accumulate the thoughts of the small number of lawyers and technologists who were focused on this issue.  As a result, a cottage industry of electronic discovery CLE’s sprung up. These were and remain helpful tools. However, for mainstream lawyers, judges, technologists and litigants, these tools are still not enough to reach them when faced with an electronic discovery problem.

The last few years have seen a number of fringe cases where painful points about electronic discovery and what can happen when litigants do not treat it seriously have been decided. Zubulake, Qualcomm, Morgan Stanley are cases where litigants were “bit by electronic discovery.” In the backdrop of the pain of these cases, there is progress being made. However, the issue of electronic discovery still faces a “tipping point” where the legal community in general becomes comfortable with the fact that most evidence is in electronic format and deals with cases with e-discovery processes and full engagement. Frankly, the industry still cries out for more best practices and processes to emerge guiding litigants on how they need to approach Electronically Stored Information (ESI) for electronic discovery. This requires additional tools to be developed and processes to tackle the issue of how to approach electronic discovery efficiently without having to review every electronic document and to be more cost effective. In a nutshell, there is still plenty of learning resources needed in the electronic discovery field.

Since we are not there yet, this website’s purpose is to enable leaders in the field to share their electronic discovery theories for free as “Bytes” of information so litigants can avoid the “Bite” of electronic discovery. ESI Bytes wants to make it easier to listen to ideas on electronic discovery, identify national electronic discovery experts and make them more accessible, and provide a forum to find regional electronic discovery experts who are also thought leaders. Some of our shows highlight issues and others are more general insights into what a particular expert thinks about the field at the time the show was taped. If we are successful, ESI Bytes can be an outlet for the work of the think tanks listed above and for companies, judges, lawyers, technologies, staffing experts, and records management experts to share their opinions on how to better deal with electronic discovery from their perspective.

Please let us know what you think. Contact us if you’d like to do a show. We are always on the lookout for ideas on future shows and speakers. Please send an email with your thoughts to kas@reviewless.com.