Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
How Can a Law Firm Touting E-Discovery Expertise Screw Up a Litigation Hold?
April 4, 2011
Thanks to colleague Jason Shinn for passing along an instructive story and a link to his blog post discussing it.
It seems that a prominent law firm in Detroit (Honigman, Miller, Schwartz and Cohn), which touts its e-discovery expertise on its "Services" page, utterly failed to institute a proper litigation hold when it was sued by a former executive assistant who had been discharged.
The firm failed to institute a litigation hold after receiving an EEOC right to sue letter – and other facts suggest the firm was preparing for the lawsuit even earlier. The firm also failed to suspend the operation of an automated e-mail deletion program when the hold should have been instituted.
It never surprises me when business clients fail to take the appropriate steps – often in ignorance of litigation holds and what they require. But seeing a law firm with supposed e-discovery expertise so thoroughly "get it wrong" is disturbing. Would the firm advise its clients to act as it apparently acted? I sure hope not.
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