Posts Tagged: "e-discovery"

Source Code Review is the most powerful tool in a litigator’s war chest in patent and trade secrets cases. An important consequence of the judicial climate shifting farther away from business methods and closer to technically complex IP is that receiving parties now face a higher burden of proof and subsequently higher legal costs. Not only are receiving parties now required to be more diligent prior to a case filing but they also end up spending extra thousands of dollars reviewing millions of lines of code to successfully formulating their infringement arguments. A significant cost and exposure risk can be avoided simply by a diligent assessment on both sides as to what source code needs to be produced to the receiving party.

The volume of electronic data and the costs involved in collecting, culling and reviewing electronically stored information (ESI) are critical considerations in any litigation, large or small. Parties to a lawsuit are inevitably faced with significant litigation costs, due in large part to the burden of responding to overly broad discovery requests relating to ESI. To maximize the value of the e-discovery process, corporate counsel should ask how outside counsel plans to efficiently analyze ESI and reduce the expenses associated with e-discovery. Here are some specific questions to consider.