Practice Areas & Industries: Beirne, Maynard & Parsons, L.L.P.

Practice/Industry Group Overview

The discovery of electronic information is arguably the most significant recent development in litigation. No longer does litigation entail the discovery, preservation, preparation, and production of mere hundreds of boxes containing thousands of documents. More likely today, discovery requests will include electronically created, stored, and manipulated documents that number in the millions. These may include everything from backup tapes of millions of emails generated over a period of years to the hidden or "metadata" about documents squirreled away in the unallocated spaces between documents on the hard drives of computers used by employees who left years ago, or from the tapes of voicemail messages to the disk drives of home computers, laptops, jump drives, and even ipods. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the state rules that mirror them, while they have long covered information created and stored electronically, have had to adapt to the new realities of information by directly addressing some procedures specific to the discovery of electronic information.

Several high-profile, headline-grabbing cases have shown that e-documents and the e-discovery process can have a significant impact on the course and outcome of litigation.

The lawyers of Beirne, Maynard & Parsons have long dealt with e-discovery issues and ultimately determined that because of the specialized knowledge of information technology and how it is implemented in client companies, and the ongoing need to stay on the cutting edge of developments in this area, our clients would be best served by the formation in our firm of an e-Discovery group.

Our attorneys continuously review and evaluate the literature related to electronic discovery so that our clients are assured that our counsel to them and our handling of their matters will not only fully comply with the rules of e-Discovery, but that we can also help them prepare for litigation involving this type of discovery. On our part, it is important that we understand the technologies in use at our client companies, so we do not have to begin learning this at the eleventh hour. And on our clients' part, they can establish formal procedures for setting up litigation holds and know ahead of time who will be responsible for what. Sanctions for failure to comply at any stage can be quite serious.

Beirne, Maynard & Parsons lawyers are frequent speakers and authors on the subject of e-Discovery. We have posted some of these articles on this web site. They are accessible via a link on this page and other areas of the site.

In addition, working with American Lawyer Media and partners such as Huron Consulting and Arkfeld and Associates - leading experts in eDiscovery and computer forensics - in 2005 we developed a CLE conference called "T3 - Trial Tactics & Technology." While T3 is not about electronic discovery exclusively, it is an important component of that conference and draws attendees from many legal disciplines. Given the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that took effect on December 1, 2006, the December 2006 conference included a mock "meet and confer" session and hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin (S.D.N.Y.), who was the presiding judge of the now famous Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, the seminal case in e-Discovery. We intend to continue hold this conference.