Practice Area(s): General Litigation
Client/Industry: Health care provider
Attorney(s): Mitch Blair, Jim Lang
Situation Summary:
Two Assistant United States Attorneys separately served subpoenas, within weeks of each other, on our not-for-profit hospital client seeking all documents in its possession related to investigations being carried out by these attorneys in St. Louis and Washington, D.C. The scope of the subpoenas and the sensitivity of the investigations required that millions of pages of electronic documents be scanned for responsiveness and produced to the United States in electronic form.
Calfee Approach:
In cooperation with the client’s legal counsel and its IT staff, Calfee attorneys planned an efficient and effective harvesting process for all electronic documents located on the client’s document and e-mail servers and on computer hard-drives of key individuals. We interviewed several vendors of electronic discovery services and retained and worked together with the vendor possessing the unique skills -- and the best price point -- necessary to harvest and review electronic documents in native format from a starting data set of over 400 Gigabytes of data (roughly equivalent to 30 million pages).
Calfee also negotiated appropriate search terms with each U.S. Attorney, which effectively limited the scope of the review.
Resolution:
We responded fully to each subpoena for our client, within the time frames set by the U.S. Attorneys. Our plan for harvesting, review and production of electronic files in native format saved the client hundreds of thousands of dollars over other options presented by outside vendors.
The results described in each case study are dependent on the specific factual and legal circumstances of the matter described, and constitute neither legal advice nor a guarantee of similar results with respect to any other matter.