Our Electronic Discovery Readiness and Response practice helps clients comply with e-discovery requirements established by the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and various state court rules.

The amended rules do not change the subject matter of the information that must be identified, reviewed, or produced during the discovery process; instead, they require that outside and in-house counsel have additional knowledge on how and where electronically stored information (ESI) is kept and the different forms in which the information may be found. As set forth in the Federal Rules and articulated in federal and state cases, parties must be able to identify the categories and location of, and any anticipated difficulties in retrieving, ESI that may be relevant to the litigation.

Managing the E-Discovery Process

DLA Piper’s Electronic Discovery Readiness and Response group, made up of lawyers and our Litigation Support Team from throughout our offices in the US and internationally, is experienced in all facets of the e-discovery process, including:

• identification
• preservation
• collection
• review
• production

Our services include development of litigation hold notices and protocol, solutions to mitigate costs related to segregation, collection, and storage of data, and strategies related to reducing the overall dataset to review for ultimate production. We also identify vendor tools that work most efficiently with specific client systems.

For our review process, we regularly use culling strategies and advanced technology to target relevant data. We also have stored data internally on secure servers, which decreases the cost of the e-discovery process for our clients.

Another means of ensuring consistency and limiting costs is our use of contract lawyers specifically trained to review and code ESI on many of these matters. Moreover, in order to provide our clients with an assessment and understanding of the costs of review and production, we have developed budgeting tools that can be adapted to individual litigation parameters.

Litigation Support Team

In addition to the team of attorneys, the E-Discovery practice is supported by a team of professionals:

• Mary Pat Poteet, National Litigation Support Director (San Diego);
• Jonathan Maas, Head of Litigation Technology (London);
• Reza Alexander, Litigation Support Manager (London);
• Lisa Clements, Litigation Support Manager (San Diego);
• Kevin Wixted, Litigation Support Manager (Chicago).

E-Discovery Experience

Our e-discovery experience includes:

• Appointed coordinating and consulting counsel for e-discovery issues for major insurance company;
• Managed the collection and review of documents resulting in the production of more than 30 million pages of documents as national discovery counsel in pharmaceutical litigation;
• Managed the international and domestic preservation, collection, and processing of electronic and paper documents as national coordinating counsel for pharmaceutical client;
• Managed the collection, review, and production of:
  • company databases for various pharmaceutical companies as national coordinating counsel;
  • more than 10 million documents as litigation counsel for telecommunications company charged with accounting fraud; and
  • more than 50 million documents as antitrust counsel for a telecommunications company.