Am I the only person who thinks that there is a Judge's Lounge where Federal Judges decide whose turn it is to remind us to pay better attention to eDiscovery? It seems like Judges Grimm and Facciola were busy this month so the task was assigned to Judge Andrew Peck, Magistrate Judge for the Southern District of New York. Judge Peck issued his self-described "˜wake-up call' to the bar in the form of William A. Gross Constr. Assocs., Inc. v. Am. Mfrs. Mut. Ins. Co., 2009 WL 724954 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 19, 2009)

The facts describe a fairly routine situation where there is a ton of ESI to search through and one side wants just a few keywords while the other wants a thousand. Judge makes a couple routine points that bear repeating here:

1. There is no "˜Easy' button to get just the right amount of information out of a massive store of ESI. Smart people have to work at getting the right keywords, and you need look at what is coming out of the searches before blindly handing it over or declaring your search to be over. Judge Peck cites both Judge Grimm and Judge Facciola (who must meet on the Washington Beltway to plot how to raise the bar for the bar) in support.




2. 
   Had the parties attempted to cooperate on the best way to get out the most relevant information, the Court's time might not have been taken up with this dispute. Here Judge Peck cites Sedona's Cooperation Proclamation in support.
   

As a near-total aside, Judge Peck points out that had the construction management firm (non-party Hill International, which generated most of the email in question) simply used a standard "Re:" line referring to the project, searching for the pertinent email would have been made much simpler.

This eloquently demonstrates a point that we here at CA try to make all the time. And that is that good records management practices (like classifying your data, even in minor ways) can have enormous payoffs when it comes to litigation. Given the vast amounts of ESI usually present in an organization, anything that can be done to reduce the amount of information in play will have vast benefits downstream. Those benefits include things like lower costs in the collection and review phases, less spending of your goodwill in front of the judge, and reduced chances that you will be the Case Of The Week that all the eDiscovery literati writes about.