The Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rules will be presenting the 2010 Civil Litigation Conference at the Duke University School of Law next week, May 10-11.  A full agenda is linked below.  I'm most interested in the Tuesday morning session, E-Discovery: Discussion of the Cost Benefit Analysis of E-Discovery and the Degree to Which the New Rules are Working or Not.  I won't be able to attend, so if you go, take lots of notes on this session and send them my way!

News Release from the US Courts Website:

Access, fairness, cost, and delay in civil litigation in federal court will be the focus of a Conference, May 10-11, 2010, sponsored by the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rules. The 2010 Civil Litigation Conference at the Duke University School of Law will present new data from several empirical studies on current litigation practice and proposals for improving civil litigation in the federal trial courts. In particular, data on actual litigation costs incurred by law firms and major corporations will be available for careful analysis. The Conference agenda is available here. The Conference will be streamed live over the Judiciary's Newsroom website.

"This Conference hopes to build on the legacy of the 1976 Roscoe Pound Conference and all it contributed to the reform of the administration and delivery of justice in the federal system, as well as on the 1997 Boston College of Law Conference on Discovery" said Judge Mark Kravitz, chair of the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules. According to Judge Kravitz the cost of civil litigation will be among the topics to be discussed, and how recent Supreme Court decisions in Twombly and Iqbal have focused attention on pleading standards and discovery.

"Much of the data to be presented at the Conference has not been available before," said Judge John G. Koeltl, a Civil Rules Committee member and Conference organizer. "This will be important new information on what is actually happening in different practice areas."

Nearly 200 nationally recognized federal judges, lawyers and professors and others with expertise in civil litigation are expected to attend. Duke University School of Law will host the Conference, which will take place in Room 3041 of the Duke Law School.

"Controlling Discovery Costs ... 'What's in your toolbox?'"

"This week Corporate Counsel from around the world will gather in Boston at the ACC Annual Meeting (10/18 – 21) to discuss trends related to “bringing control back in-house to the GC” by managing cost associated with outside counsel and the cost of discovery (specifically ediscovery). There are expected to be 3000 plus attendees over the course of the week and industry technology providers will be lining the convention halls and hotel lobby’s ready to throw the kitchen sink at passer-by’s....It is a fact that using Early Case Assessment (ECA) technology will reduce the overall cost of discovery and the litigation lifecycle. The reduced cost is directly related to lowering the amount of data for review by outside counsel. The expense of discovery is typically front loaded in the sense that identification of data for review continues to be based on the total uncompressed size of ESI collected at the onset of discovery. This is typically charged by the Gigabyte. Ironically most if not all ECA software providers and vendors know beforehand that over 60% of the ESI collected will be non-relevant to the Request for Discovery or just junk."

From blog Managing The Litigation Lifecycle. For full post, click here.

eMag Solutions now offers eMag PreVu 3.0, the latest version of eMag's web-based data management portal to sort, search and filter electronically stored information (ESI) as well as manage early stage workflow. This product provides the ability to efficiently cull large data sets prior to loading into an active archive, review tool or other repository. Enhancements include advanced searching options, the ability to group and tag files, increased options for filtering, as well as extensive reporting capabilities.  Another key aspect of PreVu 3.0 is its ability to facilitate cross-border, multi-national collections. Clients are able to utilize the hosted application in conjunction with eMag's UK processing facilities and international on-site services to accommodate international data protection and privacy laws.

Visit us at booth #335 at ACC Boston to talk with one of our representatives or click here for more information.

eMag Solutions, LLC, an international provider of enterprise content management (ECM) and electronic discovery solutions, announced today the company will introduce eMag PreVu 3.0, the latest version of eMag's web-based data management portal to sort, search and filter electronically stored information (ESI) as well as manage early stage workflow. eMag PreVu helps customers manage costs and eliminate extraneous processing steps and shorten the time to complete projects.

The introduction of version 3.0 of the eMag PreVu hosted raw data culling application will occur at next week's annual ILTA conference being held at the Gaylord National Resort & Conference Center near Washington, D.C. August 24-27th.

Early case assessment has become a critical way for organizations and their legal teams to reduce uncertainty around both the costs and management of ESI and e-discovery, while helping them gain a stronger understanding of the nature and scope of the data involved in litigation, data migration, or enterprise content management projects. eMag Solutions has a strong track record of delivering cutting edge tools that help clients achieve great success around data management, and PreVu 3.0 is yet another example of this. eMag PreVu 3.0 allows users to create early stage processing requests to facilitate e-discovery, litigation planning, or ECM to make strategic decisions more timely and effectively.

For full article, click here.

When embarking upon the e-disclosure process, many corporations, organisations and law firms are overwhelmed by the volume of data that needs to be examined - not to mention the costs associated with restoring and processing relevant files.

The plentiful supply of inexpensive electronic storage options available today, coupled with increasing regulatory compliance demands, has prompted companies to archive any file, document or correspondence they feel may be valuable at some point in the future. As a result, companies retain tremendous amounts of information, saved on hard drives or back-up media tape. This presents a significant challenge when these firms are subsequently required to produce responsive documents during litigation or regulatory compliance activities. The larger the data pool, the longer it takes to uncover and prepare relevant documents - and the higher the price tag associated with the process.

Advanced technologies are available, however, to reduce the time and costs inherent to e-disclosure activities:

• Pre-culling strategies allow corporate officers and counsel to view data structures and files in their raw native format, allowing exclusion of non-relevant information prior to expensive restoration and processing.


• Non-native data restoration allows firms to restore data without having to re-create the originating or "native" environment - that is, the combination of hardware and software used at the time the materials were preserved.

For full article, click here.

*This article was authored by Ian Bartlett, a Solutions Analyst with eMag Solutions Europe and appears in the February isse of Computers & Law (http://www.scl.org).