EDD: Issues, Law, and Solutions: Edmond Scientific Company Acquires E-Discovery Vanguard: Access Litigation

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Edmond Scientific Company Acquires E-Discovery Vanguard: Access Litigation

My friend Daniel Walschmidt had some exciting news last week. As the CEO of Access Litigaiton and the author of a superb motivational blog "the DEW VIEW ; Daniel is a driving force in the litigatin support industry and has embraced technology driven discovery methods more than anyone I know.

Before we get to the meat of his news - well how about an appetizer? Here's Daniels latest blog entry. Simple. Concise. Precise. Right on!!

Fighting for our dreams…

On the subject of dreams:

“The greatest discovery one can make is that NOTHING is impossible…”

Take 2 minutes to let this sink in. It nothing is not-doable then anything we imagine to be doable can be our future reality… The only thing that stands in the way of that realization is our determintaion to make it that way

and now the meat!

FAIRFAX, Va., Aug. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Edmond Scientific Company (ESC) has completed the acquisition of Access Litigation Support Services (ALSS). Under the terms of the agreement, ESC purchased existing EDD (Electronic Data Discovery) software including NatiVIEW Analytics 2.0 web-hosting solution, as well as proprietary data processing software, both award winning products developed by ALSS. In completing the acquisition, ESC not only complements its flourishing solutions-based litigation support business, but accelerates a strategy of service leadership through technological innovation in a rapidly growing e-discovery market.
"Initially, when we learned more about the solutions offered by ALSS, we were impressed by the gracefulness and power of the software's native file review, search, analysis, and foreign language processing features, as well as the potential to leapfrog our other development efforts and provide the foundation for our hosted review solution," states ESC Founder and CEO, John Pitale. "In keeping with our expressed goal to revolutionize the litigation support industry, we valued Access' market position over other possible alternatives. We intend to use our systems engineering-oriented approach for developing stable, robust solutions specifically tailored for client business processes, quickly building upon the complementary technological strengths and software assets of both companies, so to become a trail-blazer on the EDD frontier."

Washington, DC-based Access Litigation "couldn't be more pleased with this purchase," Access CEO Daniel Waldschmidt concedes. "Starting as a Mom-n-Pop organization, we took Access Litigation as far as we could. The growth of the company, in conjunction with continued software development, required new ideas and mature processes to be able to extend well beyond the e-discovery solutions currently available in the market. Of all the interested buyers, ESC was favored because of their ability to provide complementary skills and new discipline, while maintaining the developmental integrity of our products. We are excited for the future of e-discovery as we move forward with this deal."

About Edmond Scientific Company

Edmond Scientific Company (http://www.edmondsci.com/ ) is a professional services firm that creates innovative business solutions for both government and commercial customers. ESC's systems engineering expertise began with the design and development of mission-critical systems and software for the Department of Defense, and has since applied those skills to both the litigation support and health informatics sectors.

Edmond Scientific Company

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Sedona Principles 2nd ed.

1. Electronically stored information is potentially discoverable under Fed. R. Civ. P. 34 or its state equivalents. Organizations must properly preserve electronically stored information that can reasonably be anticipated to be relevant to litigation.
2. When balancing the cost, burden, and need for electronically stored information, courts and parties should apply the proportionality standard embodied in Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(b)(2)(C) and its state equivalents, which require consideration of the technological feasibility and realistic costs of preserving, retrieving, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information, as well as the nature of the litigation and the amount in controversy.
3. Parties should confer early in discovery regarding the preservation and production of electronically stored information when these matters are at issue in the litigation and seek to agree on the scope of each party’s rights and responsibilities.
4. Discovery requests for electronically stored information should be as clear as possible, while responses and objections to discovery should disclose the scope and limits of the production.
5. The obligation to preserve electronically stored information requires reasonable and good faith efforts to retain information that may be relevant to pending or threatened litigation. However, it is unreasonable to expect parties to take every conceivable step to preserve all potentially relevant electronically stored information.
6. Responding parties are best situated to evaluate the procedures, methodologies, and technologies appropriate for preserving and producing their own electronically stored information.
7. The requesting party has the burden on a motion to compel to show that the responding party’s steps to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information were inadequate.
8. The primary source of electronically stored information for production should be active data and information. Resort to disaster recovery backup tapes and other sources of electronically stored information that are not reasonably accessible requires the requesting party to demonstrate need and relevance that outweigh the costs and burdens of retrieving and processing the electronically stored information from such sources, including the disruption of business and information management activities.
9. Absent a showing of special need and relevance, a responding party should not be required to preserve, review, or produce deleted, shadowed, fragmented, or residual electronically stored information.
10. A responding party should follow reasonable procedures to protect privileges and objections in connection with the production of electronically stored information.
11. A responding party may satisfy its good faith obligation to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information by using electronic tools and processes, such as data sampling, searching, or the use of selection criteria, to identify data reasonably likely to contain relevant information.
12. Absent party agreement or court order specifying the form or forms of production, production should be made in the form or forms in which the information is ordinarily maintained or in a reasonably usable form, taking into account the need to produce reasonably accessible metadata that will enable the receiving party to have the same ability to access, search, and display the information as the producing party where appropriate or necessary in light of the nature of the information and the needs of the case.
13. Absent a specific objection, party agreement or court order, the reasonable costs of retrieving and reviewing electronically stored information should be borne by the responding party, unless the information sought is not reasonably available to the responding party in the ordinary course of business. If the information sought is not reasonably available to the responding party in the ordinary course of business, then, absent special circumstances, the costs of retrieving and reviewing such electronic information may be shared by or shifted to the requesting party.
14. Sanctions, including spoliation ﬁndings, should be considered by the court only if it finds that there was a clear duty to preserve, a culpable failure to preserve and produce relevant electronically stored information, and a reasonable probability that the loss of the evidence has materially prejudiced the adverse party.
Copyright © 2007 The Sedona Conference®. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted courtesy of The Sedona Conference®.
Go to http://www.thesedonaconference.org/ to download a free copy of the complete document for your personal use only.