E-discovery Is Hard

Catchy blog titles are usually hard too, but not this one. Discovery of electronically stored information (“ESI”) is just plain difficult. If you are lucky, it does not come up in your case at all. Or, the parties agree that only certain emails during a certain period of time are relevant to the dispute. If you are unlucky, you might find yourself in the middle of a massive theft of trade secrets case involving customer lists with thousands of names and an email address for each one of them. At that point, expect to spend several months creating an ESI discovery protocol with your opposing counsel – a process of negotiating everything from search terms to custodian/device lists to hard drive/server copying formats, and so on and so forth. Once that part is finished, you still have to engage in discovery according to the protocol.