Discovering Flaws: An Analysis of the Amended Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 37(E) and Its Impact on the Spoliation of Electronically Stored Evidence
Author: Clare Kealey
The legal community has not been immune to developments brought about by modern technology, nor to the intricate issues that have arisen in its wake. Lawyers, George Paul and Jason Baron eloquently opined that: “[L]awyers must understand that information, as a cultural and technological edifice, has profoundly and irrevocably changed.” Over ninety-percent of all corporate information is electronic, with North American businesses exchanging over 2.5 trillion e-mails per year. Less than one-percent of all communications will ever appear in paper form. Though the heightened acceptance and adoption of e-discovery techniques has spawned great advantages to the discovery process, such embracement is not without its problems. For example, the costs associated with the preservation of electronically stored information (ESI) and ediscovery continue to rise; some projections estimate discovery costs as being between fifty and ninety percent of the total litigation costs in a given case.