After a development process spanning more than five years, the Supreme Court approved new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure effective December 1, 2006. These Rules will fundamentally alter how electronic discovery is conducted in federal courts. While several changes simply bring the Rules in line with actual practice in the “electronic age,” there are some new provisions – in particular amendments to Rules 26, 34, and 37 – which greatly impact businesses of any size.
To meet our clients’ needs, Morrison & Foerster has continued to expend significant resources to assure that our lawyers and staff have unrivaled expertise in directing the e-discovery challenges central to success in today’s complex litigation environment. Through our firmwide E-Discovery Task Force, we have developed detailed best practices for managing e-discovery legal and technological issues and through our Litigation Technology Group we have assembled a team of technical experts available to support our cases anywhere in the world.
A number of our lawyers have been looked upon as leaders in the field, authoring articles and teaching seminars on e-discovery. Because of the depth of our practice, our experience with e-discovery extends beyond the civil litigation arena and also includes dealings with federal and local governments in criminal and civil investigations.
In addition to handling e-discovery in litigation and investigations, we provide a number of related services to our clients, including:
-
Designing, testing and implementing policies and procedures to preserve, retrieve, review, and produce electronically stored information;
-
Evaluating disparate proposals from vendors, negotiating with vendors, and managing their services to provide the best work product for the best price;
-
Training client in-house lawyers and staff on e-discovery issues, pitfalls, rules, and best practices; and
-
Establishing e-discovery contingency plans to enable our clients to be in the best position to effectively manage e-discovery demands and the unfortunately related business distractions.