Work in teams to role play an interview for a position in the litigation department of a law firm. Prepare questions and answers that a candidate should anticipate regarding electronic discovery and how litigation support software is related to e-discovery. Prepare your responses and play the roles of interviewer and candidate in front of the class. Critique students’ performances.

Question

Question: What is your understanding of electronic discovery?

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

: Court rules have been amended to include that electronically stored information (ESI) in discovery requests. The number of electronic communications makes compliance with production requests difficult. There may be multiple copies and numerous sources of information. Larger production responses include an increased vigilance to ensure that confidential and privileged materials are not divulged. The paralegal will work with information technology staff or outside vendors to arrange for conversion of documents to a uniform format and to ensure proper redaction of metadata, privileged communications and attorney work product from digital documents. The ability to recover, authenticate and analyze information may require the services of computer forensics experts.

Additionally, the law imposes a duty to preserve ESI from spoliation or destruction. The establishment of regular, routine ESI storage and destruction practices may be a sufficient basis for a litigant to avoid sanctions.

Knowledge of litigation support software is increasingly important to organize and produce data. Software applications such as Concordance or Summation provide abstracts, images and digital documents in a database that can be coded and searched by issue, dates, party or other criteria. It is utilized for ESI as well as other relevant information.