Law Commons^™

A Student Electronic Discovery Primer: An Essential Companion For Civil Procedure Courses, Jennifer M. Smith, William F. Hamilton

Faculty Books and Book Contributions

A Student Electronic-Discovery Primer supplements the traditional civil procedure textbook. The Primer is specifically designed as a practical and accessible guide for the first-year law student. Traditional civil procedure textbooks have given short shrift to what has emerged as a foundation of modern civil litigation—electronic discovery. This concise text introduces students to the new and often troubling themes of electronic discovery: preservation, search, metadata, and forms of production, touching upon the major issues that confront the use of digital data in litigation. It also includes sample electronic discovery practice forms and outlines the key 2015 amendments to the Federal Rules …

Experience, Not Logic: Adapting Spoliation Doctrine To The Brave New World Of Digital Documents, Roni A. Elias

Student Works

The adversarial system requires full discovery as an essential element of a fair and accurate litigation process. Not surprisingly, spoliation—the destruction of evidence with a culpable state of mind—is an anathema to the most fundamental principles governing litigation procedure and in turn may warrant harsh sanctions.

The doctrines governing how courts respond to spoliation are well established. But these venerable rules were mostly devised for a discovery process that involved the production of paper documents. The information revolution that accompanied the dramatic expansion of computers to produce and store every kind of document forever transformed the discovery process. As computer …

The Past, Present, And Future Of Predictive Coding, Matthew G. Kenney

Florida A & M University Law Review

Electronic discovery, or e-discovery, refers to the discovery of electronically stored documents and images.' Examples of e-discovery related documentation would include email, digital versions of paper documents (e.g. MS Word, PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint), social media postings, digital photos, Global Positioning System data, and content within computerized databases, etc. Digital data stored on computers, smartphones, tape drives, hard-drives, portable digital storage devices and the like would fall under the domain of e-discovery. Collecting and sorting massive amounts of electronically stored data presents both opportunities and challenges for lawyers.

For context: In 2015, electronic discovery was a $10.2 billion global industry. …