The Law Planet Blog

Electonic Data Discovery, and other areas relating to electronic data storage, are hot topics in litigation and arbitration, whether in the securities field or other commercial disputes. There have been many articles written about the new sections of Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. What is not often discussed is the practical advantages of reducing the amount of paper being carried around and the amount of stress (when the computers are working) that is removed through proper usage of electronic media.

Here is a recent example of how some planning and Adobe Acrobat can make your life easy. My partner and I were defending a securities client in an arbitration brought by a group of unhappy non-clients of our client. We had litigated the same underlying issue with the same law firm two years ago. We had agreed with that law firm that the documents from the prior case could be used in this case, so that we did not have to produce the same universe of documents twice. Among the documents from the prior case was a list of clients of the broker, who went to jail for what he did.

We advised the arbitrators that this list was produced in the prior case and that counsel should have a copy among the (disorganized) papers he had in his possession. He wanted proof that we had produced the document in the prior case. Before we left the office, Debra and I both used the Microsoft Windows Offline Files function to synchronize all of the documents, pleadings and discovery, to our laptops. When the issue came up, I was able to locate the subject document in seconds. But we had a problem -- we wanted to maintain confidentiality of the contents and wanted to denote on the document that it was produced in the current case, not just the prior one.

While sitting at the counsel table, I opened the document, a PDF, in Acrobat and added a footer with all of the case identifying information and the confidentiality warning. Then, using the HP portable printer that is almost always with me at hearing, I printed out the document and gave a copy to opposing counsel, all the while listening to his examination of my witness. The witness was ordered to review the document over lunch, which he did, and his testimony was over within a few minutes of returning to lunch.

Think about this story the next time you are loading up boxes and boxes of paper discovery documents into your car or onto the messenger's truck. And think about the fact that the prior case had an equally large number of documents. Yet we did not bring a single box of production documents, from either case, to the hearing, only our exhibit notebooks.

The electronic document management train is leaving the station. If you're going to compete, you need to get on, but there's no room for storage boxes of documents in the overheads!

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