Preparing Yourself And Your Agency for an eDiscovery Court Trial

When an electronic discovery request accompanying a lawsuit is filed against your agency, you should be ready to face it by having a keen understanding of how the process works. Firstly, you should observe the law in submitting the requested ESI or electronically stored information that will serve as evidence for your case.

As the head of the agency, you should be familiar with its ins and outs, its work systems and how these systems are related to e discovery law.

When a lawsuit is filed against you, you should first work towards ensuring that the essential records are not destroyed in any way. In ediscovery law, this is referred to as litigation hold. Some of the records for the case include web pages, cookies, emails, website log files, voice mail and cache files, among others.

Find out the type of the information that electronic discovery law deems as being important. Understand the forensic procedures that might be involved. Materials that can be recovered will be available from floppy disks, cell phones, magnetic tapes, DVDs, CDs, logs, websites and PDAs. You should be ready to present the mentioned storage devices upon request.

The two parties should set up a meeting to talk about the ediscovery process and pin point the data required for the investigation, how data collection should be expedited, the costs and time period. This step is open to negotiations as parties must come to an agreement on how the information will be gathered, processed, reviewed, analyzed, produced and presented at the trial.

You must understand how the size of the case can affect the ediscovery request. The ediscovery request for cases where there is a lot on line can be more elaborate. The investigation performed for minor cases related to electronic discovery law is usually less.

Understand and assess your options. You have the option of a settlement with the complainant that works out well for both parties involved, before the case can go to trial. You will negotiate with the legal representative from the accusing party. Even where they may seem unrelenting and determined to have their way, you must cooperate. In e discovery law this is a requirement on your part.