2018 ESI Seminar Bundle

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as other lesser-known social networking platforms used within the workplace, can be a treasure trove of information about workplace culture. These postings also can yield powerful evidence in the form of contemporaneous statements that undermine pretextual explanations for why your client was fired, or disciplined, or not promoted. At the same time, social media postings can be a minefield creating distractions for your case and potentially damaging your client’s credibility. Our speakers will discuss the state of the law as it relates to social media discovery, and provide practical advice on how to maximize the opportunities of social media for developing your case while avoiding traps for the unwary. In addition, they will explore how to best cull, preserve, download, upload, extract, and review social media discovery.

What is ESI, and what makes it so valuable, as compared to more traditional forms of discovery? This presentation will provide a review of technical terms, sources of ESI, and overall best practices so you can fully engage in ESI discovery competently.

What questions/topics need to be included in the letter preceding the conference? Who needs to be involved in preparing for and participating in the conference? What needs to be addressed during the conference and set forth in the report? Our panelists will answer these questions and more, and help you understand how to use the Rule 26(f) conference to educate yourself about the discovery that exists and how best to obtain it.

An ESI Protocol is an essential tool that can cover preservation obligations, identify custodians and other sources of electronic data to be searched, and specify the search protocols that will be used, including not only search terms or the use of predictive coding, but also de-nisting, de-duplication, threading, and numerous other choices that will affect what electronic documents are produced, and the form in which they are produced. This panel will help you start off on the right foot in negotiating a comprehensive ESI Protocol, and give you the information you need to litigate these issues if negotiation is unsuccessful.

The proliferation of ESI and various applications that can be used to create, store, and search for it has important ethical implications for advocates. Our panelists will help you understand how our various ethical obligations—duty of competence, duty to maintain client confidentiality, etc.—are implicated when working with various forms of ESI.

Technology continues to evolve and new applications producing potentially discoverable ESI emerge every day. This panel will help ensure that you stay on the cutting-edge of the ever-changing law governing the preservation, collection, and production of ESI.

These ESI experts will help you to identify what can be handled in house and when you need an expert or third-party vendor, and why; provide you techniques to effectively search and sort ESI on a budget; and offer an overview of analytics and other tools that can help you get the most out of the ESI that is produced.

This panel will make sure you know your client’s preservation obligations and how to communicate clearly with your client about them; introduce you to cost-effective tools and techniques appropriate for collecting email and other electronic documents from your clients; and also methods to ease the burden of producing electronic documents to the defendant, while ensuring their integrity.

As trial technology has grown less expensive and become more accessible, advocates have new tools to organize and present evidence in creative and compelling ways. Learn from experienced trial advocates about the types of trial technology that are available and whether incorporating new technology into your trial strategy may be the key to winning your next case.

Motions to compel e-discovery invariably include cost/burdensome objections and, in the wake of the 2015 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, proportionality concerns under Rule 26. This panel will examine how to address these and other objections and obtain the discovery you need in a usable format, including what it means for ESI to be in the defendant’s “possession, custody, or control” and/or maintained “in the usual course of business” in the era of e-discovery, while also offering a perspective on these issues from the other side of the “v.”