Extract from Frank Ready’s article “E-Discovery’s Evolving Caselaw: More Sanctions, Less Patience for Pushy Clients”
The one thing that doesn’t appear to have slowed down in 2020 was e-discovery case law opinions. Just ask Kelly Twigger, founder of eDiscovery Assistant, and Doug Austin, editor of eDiscovery Today.
The longtime e-discovery professionals teamed up to create the “2020 eDiscovery Case Law Year in Review” report, which was released earlier this month and contains data from more than 2,800 e-discovery case opinions from throughout the past year. Per the report, the number of e-discovery decisions in general has been growing steadily since changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were enacted in 2015, with this year’s decision tally of 2870 up 765 cases from 2019.
So what are the lessons that lawyers and legal professionals should be taking away from 2020? For starters, the number of sanctions rose dramatically from 478 cases in 2019 to 851 last year. But the largest number of case decisions in the eDiscovery Assistant database in 2020 had to do with issues of proportionality, which rose from 475 cases in 2019 to 889 cases in 2020.
