Legal

Feature Stories

Sedona Watch: The Sedona Conference® Goes Global
By Cecil A. Lynn, III Esq., Director, Industry Relations

When people think of Sedona, they usually visualize the breathtaking red sandstone rock formations of a small Northern Arizona town. However, in the legal community, The Sedona Conference® (TSC) means something different, although its name is somewhat of a misnomer as it is not a conference. Rather, TSC is a Sedona-based nonprofit research and educational institution dedicated to the study of law and policy. TSC achieves this goal through the creation of Working Groups or “think tanks” that seek to develop sets of uniform guidelines, principles, and best practices on cutting edge and novel issues of law in the areas of complex litigation, antitrust and intellectual property rights.

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FRCP Readiness: 10 Practical Tips for Paralegals

The amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP)^[1] place a tremendous amount of responsibility on parties to meet and confer to identify and resolve issues related to the preservation and production of electronically stored information. The rules also reinforce the notion that lawyers must communicate with their clients to become familiar with their clients electronic information systems and document retention policies. These responsibilities will necessarily trickle down to legal assistants and paralegals who interface with and assist clients in preparing and responding to discovery. The following 10 tips are aimed at giving paralegals and legal assistants a practical approach to readiness for the amended rules.

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Columbia Pictures v. Bunnell: Foreign Privacy Laws vs. U.S. Discovery Obligations

Courts have never been fond of plaintiffs who flock to a faraway forum seeking justice when a more appropriate forum lies around the corner. So it comes as no surprise that in Columbia Pictures Indus. v. Bunnell, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 46364 (C.D. Cal. June 19, 2007), the court gave short shrift to defendants who sought the protection of Dutch law to avoid preserving and producing relevant information while allegedly facilitating the worldwide downloading of copyrighted movies and music. While the case raises significant issues in electronic discovery due to the court’s ordering the defendants to preserve transient data stored in random access memory (RAM), it also underscores the longstanding general principle that those who do business in the United States must accept the burdens along with the benefits of U.S. law.

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Top 10 Tips to Prepare for FRCP Changes
By Cecil A. Lynn, III Esq., Director, Industry Relations

The recent e-discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) have had a tremendous impact on practice for litigators, in-house counsel, and other attorneys with responsibility for providing companies with general corporate governance advice. The following 10 tips are aimed at giving all those affected a practical approach to readiness for the amended rules.

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Managing International Data for Maximum E-Discovery Preparedness
By Cecil A. Lynn, III Esq., Director, Industry Relations

Over the past few years, the emergence of concerns related to electronic discovery has led many multinational companies, and the law firms that service them, to make concentrated efforts to control and manage data created, stored, or sent overseas. It is no easy task. An estimated 99% of new information is stored electronically, mostly on computer hard disks, and experts predict that, by the end of 2006, 60 billion email messages will be sent each day. This is a tremendous amount of data considering that a company’s primary day-to-day contact with its own foreign executives may be conducted through not only emails, but also instant messaging, online video conferencing, and other forms of electronic communications.

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Leveraging Technology Resources for Effective and Efficient Regulatory Review

Electronic review and production is no more expensive than paper review and production, yet the use of technology for electronic review and production and the benefits for the producing corporations and the reviewing agencies can result in a faster merger review overall.

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