E-Discovery Tips to Benefit Your Law Practice

By Gina F. Rubel
Special to the Legal

The Legal Intelligencer hosts its annual Litigation Summit in Philadelphia, which covers a potpourri of issues from e-discovery to trends in the courtroom. As an avid Twitter user, I often share important tips from the speaker using the conference hashtag #TLILitSum. Another way to share those tips is to compile them in a blog for all of our lawyer friends who do not actively use social media.

Here are just a few of the e-discovery takeaways from the CLE program presented by Gerard Dever of Fine, Kaplan and Black, Stephen Harvey of Pepper Hamilton, Shawn Huston of Legal Support Partners, Michael Nelson of DFDR Consulting and Melinda Sungenis of the TASA Group.

• Changes have been proposed for the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure regarding e-discovery. Keep an eye on Rules 1, 26 and 37.
• Requests for social media information are standard in litigation today. However, the social media being requested must be relevant and specific; requests cannot be fishing expeditions. In order to get social media data via e-discovery, you must request specific data including user credentials from the custodian or access the information publicly, if security settings make the information available to all.
• E-discovery needs to be considered early in litigation in order to preserve evidence, especially electronic data, which exists everywhere. Create a data map including all computers, email accounts and servers, smartphones and cellphones, network servers, clouds, databases, proprietary systems, black boxes, fax machines, printers, GPS systems, social media sites, photos, apps, shared drives, PowerPoint presentations, Dropbox files, etc.
• A button on Facebook that says "download my data" allows users to capture their full activity log. Directions on how to do this may be found here.
• Facebook has a 14-day data hold policy until it will overwrite a deactivated account.
• Geolocation data, such as location tags on photographs or “check-ins” on Facebook or the social location app Foursquare can be extremely valuable in litigation.

‏Do you have any other e-discovery tips that you’d like to share? Include them in the comments.

Gina F. Rubel is the owner of Furia Rubel Communications Inc., an integrated marketing and public relations agency with a niche in legal marketing. She and her agency have won national awards for law firm marketing, PR, website and graphic design, social media, strategic planning, corporate philanthropy and leadership. She maintains a blog at www.ThePRLawyer.com and is a contributor toThe Legal Intelligencer Blog, AVVO Lawyernomics and The Huffington Post. Find her on LinkedIn atwww.linkedin.com/in/ginafuriarubel or follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/ginarubel. For more information, go to www.FuriaRubel.com.