E-Discovery Law a Boon for Lawyers
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Corporate attorneys cite a jump in the use of outside law firms after e-discovery regulations went into effect last year.
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By ACHIM SCHMILLEN  DO YOU REMEMBER every Web site you visited, every e-mail you sent, and every word you Googled during the last two years? Probably not, but your Internet service provider might  especially if a proposal currently popular in Washington becomes law.
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The search engine is good for more than just scouring the Web. It's also a powerful tool for the shadier side of online data collection.
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Do patents, white papers, and other publications authored by search engine employees provide clear guidance to how to optimize Web pages?  A panel of experts debated the issue at a recent Search Engine Strategies conference.
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Users will be able to choose whether their pages are revealed to outside search engines.
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Internet law professor Michael Geist wonders whether technology threatens the legal foundations of privacy law.
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Do future generations need a legal representative today to protect their interests? Some legal and environmental scholars think so.
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A proposed law would require companies to keep detailed data about peopleâs Internet and phone use that goes beyond a European Union directive.
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A lawyer for an anonymous bidder acquired a set of patents covering important aspects of commercial Internet transactions for $15.5 million.
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perspective Attorney Eric J. Sinrod explains the ramifications of a recent case on the future of open-source software.
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(InfoWorld) - Demand for data storage and retrieval products will increase thanks to new rules governing how digital documents are gathered for civil cases in U.S. federal courts. Among other things, the amended Federal Rules for Civil Procedures (FRCP) delineate how enterprises must respond when compelled to produce documents in a lawsuit. They also let judges decide whether a records request puts an undue financial burden on an enterprise. The updated FRCPs take effect in federal courts on Dec. 1, but individual states are in various stages of implementing some or all of the same rules in their own court systems. California, New Hampshire and Maryland are in the process of adopting these so-called "e-discovery" rules; changes took effect in Idaho July 1. New Jersey's new rules went into effect on Friday. The rule changes focus new attention on technology to catalogue, retrieve and restore documents stored on backup tapes or hard drives. These e-discovery rules, on top of data retention requirements under Sarbanes-Oxley for public firms, HIPAA for health-care enterprises and other regulations, should further spur the already robust data storage and retrieval market. The e-mail archiving market -- most of the documents sought in a corporate lawsuit are e-mails -- is expected to grow to US$7.8 billion by 2010, from $796 million by the end of 2006, according to research firm The Radicati Group Inc. Zantaz Inc., a seller of information retention and discovery management software and services, unveiled this week a tape cataloging service. Cataloging backup tapes can help an enterprise comply with one new e-discovery requirement, said Francis Lambert, senior compliance advisor at Zantaz, in Pleasanton, California. It requires that the IT staff of a company being sued meet with the company's lawyers and opposing counsel early in the discovery process after the suit is filed. The IT professionals need to be able to explain where records being sought are located, in what format and how they can be retrieved, said Lambert. This puts a new onus on an enterprise to get a handle on its document system, he said. "It's important that the IT people be able to inform the company and their counsel what's in their system. They need to better arm themselves for their pretrial conference," Lambert said. Better cataloging can save the cost of restoring documents from dozens of tapes if the enterprise is able to identify the one tape that contains the requested documents. New technology has made tape restoration less expensive, said Kris Haworth , the managing director of the Law and Economics Consulting Group, which advises clients on compliance issues. The firm is advising clients being investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly backdating stock options. Since some of those cases date to the mid-1990s, a lot of e-mails are on backup tapes, she said. "It used to be $1,000 a tape to restore, but now it's in the hundreds of dollars," Haworth said. Judges have the authority to decide that requested documents are inaccessible because reproducing them would impose an "undue burden" on the company asked to provide the information. But as the cost of data retrieval goes down, "it's going to become very difficult to argue that the data is inaccessible," Haworth said. The new rules could also spur sales of hard disk storage hardware for data protection and retrieval, said Manish Goel, vice president and general manager of data protection and retention at Network Appliance Inc., a Sunnyvale, California-based storage device maker. Seventy to 80 percent of the files stored on enterprise networks are "unstructured data," Goel said, such as Word documents, PDFs (Portable Document Formats), Excel files. Network Appliance introduced software modules Aug. 14 to its Information Server 1200, designed to find that unstructured data, which the company introduced in November 2005.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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The Importance of writes &quot;The INDUCE Act, which has been discussed many times previously, will likely be getting a lot more attention thanks to the recent Grokster decision.
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Book 'em, Google New developments in online selling and the lawPublishers and authors are taking Google to court over its programme to digitise the libraries of four US universities, Oxford university library and the New York Public Library.â¦
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The e-tailer, seeking users' input, invests in online collaboration.
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Autonomy&#39;s ZANTAZ division said Wednesday its e-discovery software can now find information stored in virtual environments.The functionality comes in the form of a new module for the company&#39;s Introspect product, according to Nicole Eagan, Autonomy&#39;s chief marketing officer. The module can search multiple virtual file servers running a number of operating systems, freeing up IT shops from doing the work manually, according to the company.Given the &quot;extreme&quot; type of rulings that have occurred in the e-discovery realm, such as one court&#39;s order that a company preserve its RAM data, virtualized information should undoubtedly factor into companies&#39; efforts to comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure concerning electronically stored information, Eagan said.The company said it supports the product&#39;s use in a range of virtual environments, including VMware, Microsoft, Parallels, VirtualBox, Virtual Iron, Kernel-based Virtual Machine, and VirtualLogix VLX.Guy Creese, an analyst with Burton Group, said the new capability holds value but perhaps only for customers with more drastic needs.&quot;Basically, if you&#39;re going through e-discovery, you want to &quot;wall off&quot; the relevant data (put it &#39;on hold&#39;),&quot; he said Wednesday. &quot;Virtualization is a good way to do this as you can put a virtual machine on a server and prevent others from getting to it.&quot;An IT shop could also put data in a secured repository and add yet another layer of security by putting the repository in a virtual setting, he added.&quot;Autonomy says they can make these different virtual machines look like one environment,&quot; he added. &quot;This is a valuable feature, but this is a niche capability as few companies would have this complex an e-discovery infrastructure.&quot;Eagan acknowledged that the new capability might find its first adopters among larger enterprises. &quot;That&#39;s where it will start, that&#39;s where litigation is most prominent,&quot; she said.She declined to provide specific pricing information.
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Analysis Lawyer calls for urgent domain dispute reform
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The virtual world is just swarming with lawsuits waiting to happen. Here are a few of the cases you can anticipate.