Relativity and X1 Publish Joint Legal Whitepaper on ESI Collection Best Practices

By John Patzakis

Relativity and X1 have published a joint legal whitepaper on the topic of full-disk imaging as a disfavored collection practice in civil litigation, with Relativity eDiscovery attorney David Horrigan as the lead author. The paper delves into all the legal reasons, including detailed analysis of case law, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the Sedona Principles establishing why forensic collection is not required in civil litigation. The paper primarily focuses on the principles of proportionality in its legal analysis as well as case law issued prior to the 2015 amendment to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which gave greater prominence and clarification of the proportionality rules.

This is an important topic as a key problem in eDiscovery that drives inefficiencies and higher costs is that default collection methods often involve full-disk imaging—a forensic examination of an entire computer—when searching for responsive data. As the whitepaper notes, “it turns out full-disk imaging is not required for most eDiscovery collections. In fact, courts often disfavor the practice.”

A copy of the whitepaper can be found here.