Electronic Discovery Navigator

When is ‘Under Seal’ Not ‘Under Seal’? GE Finds Out the Hard Way

When is ‘Under Seal’ Not ‘Under Seal’? GE Finds Out the Hard Way

"To say lawyers and technology mix like oil and water might be an overstatement. Still, from time to time we come across a tale in which a smallish technological problem leads to big headaches for lawyers. It always makes us wonder if life in the law weren’t a little less thorny back before the days of email and electronic discovery, back-up tapes and terabytes of data.

The latest saga comes courtesy of the class action sex-discrimination brought case against General Electric. (Click here for a previous post about the case). According to this story in the Connecticut Law Tribune, plaintiffs lawyers at Sanford, Wittels & Heisler in Washington, D.C. filed several documents with the court in which it had redacted certain passages about GE.

Or so it thought."

Clumsy Redaction Can Spell Negligence

Clumsy Redaction Can Spell Negligence

"I speak of redacting electronic documents by converting them to TIFF images, blacking out privileged and confidential content, then clumsily attempting to recreate electronic searchability by optical character recognition. When applied to spreadsheets and databases, it simply doesn't work. Why, then, are we content to spin invisible cloth rather than acknowledge the emperor's privates are on parade?

Good sense and fair play dictate that redaction methods preserve the integrity of unredacted content and the searchability and usability of the document. Instead, expediency and anxiety drive use of TIFF and OCR for redaction, enabling counsel to cling to familiar, if shopworn, "black line" redaction methods out of fear that privileged contents lurk in some dark digital recess."

High Volume Redaction

Law firms offered more cost effective solution for in-house, high volume redaction

"The new Rapid Redact High Volume Server, released today, gives law firms and corporate counsel a more cost effective option to redact large volumes of documents in-house.  Taking greater control of the redaction process can minimize the risks, time and costs involved.

Rapid Redact High Volume Server is the latest product in the Rapid Redact suite, widely used by litigation teams and government departments including the military to efficiently redact documents."