Court Comes Down Hard On E-Discovery Non-Cooperation

A plaintiff insurance company wanted to deviate from an agreed upon e-discovery protocol by using predictive coding instead of costlier manual review on a collection of documents that already had been culled out by a keyword search, and the magistrate judge balked. An article from Ropes & Gray looks at this and some other district court rulings that underscore the increasing importance courts are placing on e-discovery cooperation between litigants. There are a number of lessons to be drawn; one of them is that parties need to be careful they don’t, in the name of cooperation, enter into an agreement that will lock them into a procedure that imposes unreasonable and expensive limitations.