On March 7th, Discovery Genie founder Dan Culhane conducted a Continuing Legal Education webinar: COMPLIANCE AND ETHICAL PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS IN DOCUMENT PRODUCTION; USING DISCOVERY GENIE TO SATISFY YOUR OBLIGATION TO PRODUCE EMAILS, ATTACHMENTS, AND ELECTRONIC FILES WHILE MEETING PROFESSIONAL AND ETHICAL REQUIREMENTS. A video recording of the presentation is now online and available for viewing.
The webinar was hosted by the Colorado Bar Association and participants received a CLE credit for their attendance. The presentation discussed discovery challenges faced by litigation professionals and highlighted strategies for balancing professional, ethical, and business obligations.
Court Rules, such as C.R.C.P. 26 and F.R.C.P. 26, require disclosure and production of electronic documents, including relevant emails and attachments. Those rules also require a litigant to generate and serve a privilege log whenever a document is withheld as privileged or work product. C.R.C.P. 26(b)(5)(A). Producing emails, attachments, and electronic records, standard practice is to convert each document to PDF, and add a Bates number to each page to facilitate identification of each specific page during the litigation.
The Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct require attorneys to preserve client confidences. C.R.P.C.1.6(a) prohibits a lawyer from revealing confidential client information, except where “disclosure is impliedly authorized in order to carry out the representation.” This exception includes production of appropriate materials in disclosure and discovery in litigation, subject to privileged materials or attorney work product.
Lawyers must spend valuable professional time and resources complying with these obligations. Yet clients frequently resist paying professionals for these tasks, frequently on the grounds that completing these tasks yields no substantive progress in resolving the dispute. The tension between compliance with rules, and avoiding wasting time on tasks that clients and lawyers alike recognize as non-productive, can put a law firm in an untenable position.
Discovery Genie, an online, on-demand document review/productionsystem, provides a solution to this problem, and facilitates compliance with the rules while avoiding 75-90% of the professional time needed to review and produce documents. Discovery Genie is aweb-based system that makes document production fast, easy, and inexpensive. Designed by litigation attorneys, Discovery Genie puts the professional in control of the discovery process by automating the preparation of emails, attachments, and other electronic documents.
The presentation is available for viewing at https://vimeo.com/322090487.