Judges speak candidly on new e-discovery rules

Judges speak candidly on new e-discovery rules: "The Supreme Court's amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP), which went into effect Dec. 1, 2006, have opened up a can of worms for IT and legal professionals under litigation, according to judges and attorneys at the Legal Tech conference in New York this week. For storage professionals, the word is that recovering data for litigation purposes is about to become an even bigger headache.

The amendments to the rules address two key areas: discovery of electronically stored information (ESI) and inadvertent production of privileged or 'sensitive' company data. These amendments were the focus of a panel at the conference and more specifically, a finer point within the rules that encourages parties to agree on the format in which ESI will be produced. The party requesting documents may ask for them in their native format complete with metadata, e.g. Microsoft Word for a .doc file or Microsoft Excel for an .xls file, as opposed to more generic file formats, as this provides more information about the data. However, in cases that have been heard since the new amendments, the production of metadata along with the actual file is raising eyebrows in the courts as it is dragging out proceedings, experts said.