E-discovery evidence can win or lose a case
September 14th, 2008The Los Angeles Business Journal recently posted an interesting article about how today’s lawyers not only need to be experts in their field of law, but increasingly also need to be eDiscovery experts. More and more e-mails, instant messages and other electronically stored documents are being used as evidence in disputes ranging from corporate law to divorce procedures. This has resulted in the emergence of more lawyers and legal assistants specializing in the sifting through and extraction of electronic documents as legal evidence.
Today, e-discovery is a lot more complicated and critical to litigation. The 2006 Federal eDiscovery rules mandate that attorneys start an electronic discovery process early in litigation. They also need to share the retrieval of these documents with opposing counsel.
Litigators have seen a definite transformation in the way cases are tried. Where in the past, case evidence was limited to a contract, pieces of correspondence and possibly a few handwritten notes, today’s cases require advanced key word and phrase searching in order to uncover the critical evidence for a case. The eDiscovery process has become so crucial that many litigators go as far as hiring specialized e-discovery professionals to retrieve the required information.
According to Michael Zweiback, a litigator in the Los Angeles office of Alston & Bird LLP, just hiring experts is not enough: “You can hire experts, but sometimes experts are only as good as the questions that are asked,” Zweiback said. “And if you don’t know the right questions to ask, you are at a disadvantage”.
Since evidence is crucial to any case, it makes sense that the actual discovery of evidence is an extremely important factor in the outcome of a case, especially if that information is not readily available. Lawyers who are knowledgeable about e-discovery capabilities and can retrieve crucial electronic records as evidence are likely to have an edge in today’s litigation. Just keep that in mind the next time you hire a lawyer..
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