eDiscovery

With a singular focus, our eDiscovery team pushes the limits of innovation to provide enhanced value, marrying technology skills, litigation experience, and substantial subject matter knowledge to bring advanced solutions to our clients.

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Our eDiscovery lawyers rely on legal principles, data, and cutting-edge technology to solve clients’ business challenges resulting from the explosion of information and emergent technologies in the workplace.

Your Strategic Partner

In a world where technology has moved from the realm of science fiction to everyday reality, and business is conducted digitally–and globally, electronic data is important to every workplace claim, investigation and lawsuit. We help small organizations to multinational corporations, and offer a full range of eDiscovery services to meet the needs of any case, including small, single-plaintiff administrative charges, internal investigations where only a handful of key custodians’ emails are at issue, whistleblower, trade secret theft, and non-compete matters where disputes over unique data sources are the central focus of the case, bet-the-company, nationwide class or collective actions where terabytes of data and often hundreds of potential systems are in play, and portfolios of litigation that span the globe.

Keyboard of laptop with search bar graphic

Singular Focus

Littler pioneered the practice of hiring attorneys as shareholders to focus exclusively on eDiscovery. Over the last two decades, the firm has built a team of thought-leading attorneys dedicated full-time to managing eDiscovery worldwide, who provide targeted advice, strategy and hands-on litigation assistance to Littler’s clients and thousands of lawyers practicing in hundreds of offices around the globe.

Reducing Classwide Preservation Burdens

We apply leading-edge strategies for avoiding significant operational burdens and costs associated with nationwide preservation on class/collective/PAGA actions.
Applying Proportionality Mandates to Peripheral Data Preservation

We leverage proportionality concepts to alleviate the burden of preserving and producing peripheral data sources.
“Leveling the Playing Field” in Asymmetrical Cases

We aggressively focus discovery on preservation, search, and production of ESI under individual plaintiffs’ control, especially in asymmetrical cases.
Cross-Border Data Transfers

With offices worldwide, we handle a portfolio of cross-border matters involving international data regulations and privacy regimes, including for data that resides in APAC, EMEA, Latin America, the North America.

State-of-the-Art Technologies

Our eDiscovery lawyers work hand-in-hand with a team of litigation support project managers, quality control specialists, developers, data analysts and database administrators to leverage state-of-the-art technology to streamline the collection, management, review, production and presentation of evidence. Littler’s Relativity Data Center provides clients with a turnkey solution for processing electronic evidence and hosting case databases. Littler was a first-to-market adopter of Relativity enterprise wide, and in 2019, Littler was the first AmLaw 100 to migrate to RelativityOne.

Relativity Case Dynamics

A secure, cloud platform to organize and analyze case details – facts, issues, organizations, people, interview questions, and key documents.
Everchron

A secure, collaborative cloud platform for transcript management, including AI enhanced capabilities to streamline workflows and case preparation.
OnCue

A trial presentation platform that streamlines the organization and presentation of evidence.
Microsoft SharePoint

Web-based collaborative workspaces for distributed teams.

We also have significant vendor relationships to leverage for specialized assistance, such as: harvesting unique sources of electronic data from emergent sources like ephemeral/self-deleting/encrypting messaging apps, contemporary workplace technologies, industry-specific applications, and outdated legacy systems; forensic analyses of electronic media; “day-in-the-life” visualization of varied sources of data; and managed document review (offering an alternative pricing approach to what can sometimes be the costliest aspect of large cases).

Our Experience

We serve as national eDiscovery counsel for multinational retail, healthcare, transportation, and chemical organizations by providing global eDiscovery, AI, and data governance advice on employment litigation matters and company-wide eDiscovery policies, practices, and procedures. This includes serving as lead eDiscovery counsel for federal and state class, collective actions and California Private Attorney General Act lawsuits.

We directed the discovery strategy for an unprecedented union organizing campaign by the NLRB leveled at a global retail organization, involving hundreds of unfair labor practice (ULP) charges and associated ULP trials across the country. In a break from 40 years of practice, the NLRB served extensive preservation demands, requests for evidence, and subpoenas seeking ESI in these cases. Activities included standing up new practices and procedures for preserving, identifying, collecting, culling, searching, and producing massive volumes of data under accelerated NLRB procedural deadlines, and addressing unique burden, proportionality, and privilege objections (including unique privileges like Berbeglia) in the labor context. We also took a front-line role in trials handling discovery and evidentiary issues, including in one trial that was reported as the largest ULP case in the NLRB’s history.

We directed all eDiscovery in a lawsuit resulting from an EEOC systemic investigation of individuals who worked at hundreds of distribution centers across the country during a 15-year period, including: collecting for culling, searching, reviewing and producing email from three systems/email archives; preparation of a privilege log with over 16,000 individual entries; implementing a standard approach for interviewing witnesses and collecting data from hundreds of local facilities; and pushing back on custodians and search terms proposed by the EEOC, including documenting burdens of tens of millions of dollars even after post-culling of data.

We directed all eDiscovery activities for a precedent-setting California class action challenging a piece-rate system for compensation with industry-wide implications for the trucking business. The class encompassed over 11,000 current members and covered a 15-year period. Our work included extracting, restoring, and collecting over 80 billion database records, 6,000 tables, and 130,000 data fields. From there, we culled, sorted, and reviewed that data to limit relevant productions to approximately 1 billion electronic records. We created a litigation-specific “Data Dictionary” for the complex IT systems (including decommissioned legacy systems) for use by all parties’ experts. This supported decertifying the class on the eve of trial, as the produced data conclusively proved that individual questions, a lack of common proof, and manageability issues, made continued class treatment unworkable.

Led backup tape remediation project involving over 10 petabytes of data
Defended large distribution client against spoliation motion in discrimination class action involving over a decade of fact history and multiple data sources
Developed preservation plan and protocol for national staffing agency’s portfolio of employment matters, including administrative charges, single plaintiff litigation, and class actions
Defended large retail client against sanctions related to alleged spoliation of surveillance video in single plaintiff discrimination case
Achieved terminating and monetary sanctions in federal court case that was affirmed by a circuit court on appeal, by proving text messages were fabricated by plaintiff
Developed international protocols for foreign language search strategies
Defended technology startup company against demands for production of critical source code in wage and hour class action
Led multi-pronged investigation involving digital forensics of multiple business assets, expert analysis of security event logs across multiple data streams, and AI-assisted analysis of over one million communication items
Led legal strategy and oversight of briefing and forensic expert testimony in successful motion for spoliation sanctions against employee plaintiff of national transportation company
Developed protocol for managing data and review involving “top secret,” security clearance, ITAR and other regulated data
Developed protocols for secure, compliant cross-border transfers and defensible redaction and pseudonymization techniques to comply with global data privacy laws, in reverse race class action involving data on four continents
Addressed preservation for hundreds of custodians and multiple IT systems across nationwide litigation portfolio in conjunction with asset sale of several divisions
Led computer forensic and ESI issues for a portfolio of cases involving the raid of hundreds of employees to prove solicitation and theft of proprietary pricing and customer lists
Led forensic investigation and analysis to prove through access logs and IP addresses, that despite denying having done so, plaintiff signed arbitration agreement, resulting in case being moved from federal court to arbitration

Our Impact

We have leadership roles in industry organizations, including The Sedona Conference Working Groups 1 and 6, the Georgetown Law Global Advanced eDiscovery Institute, and the International Data Law Association.

These activities have provided us the opportunity to transform the eDiscovery field. We literally “wrote the book” on topics like possession, custody and control (see The Sedona Conference’s Commentary on Rules 34 and 45 Possession, Custody or Control), cross-border transfers of data (see The Sedona Conference WG6 International Litigation Principles on Discovery, Disclosure and Data Protection in Civil Litigation), and leveling the playing field in asymmetrical cases (see The Electronic Discovery Institute Judges’ Guide to Discovery, Chapter 12, “In Employment Cases, eDiscovery is a Two-Way Street”).

Interviewing IT, operations, and business personnel to identify all sources of ESI that may be relevant and proportional to claims or defenses in a case
Implementing global – and proportional – preservation strategies, including determining when the duty to preserve has been triggered, issuing comprehensive legal holds, and conducting follow-up audits to ensure compliance
Participating in federal court Rule 26(f) (and state equivalent) “meet-and-confer” conferences with plaintiffs’ counsel, and Rule 16 conferences with the court, to proactively address eDiscovery issues in a strategic manner
Creating strategies for efficient and effective data collection and harvesting
Creating data processing strategies to find the fastest, most cost-effective, and most efficient method for getting raw data into a reviewable format, using defensible best practices
Strategic use of advanced data analytics and technologies to reduce discovery burdens and identify key evidence
Designing protocols to protect sensitive data, including through proprietary presumptive privilege/PII/PHI scripts, and protective orders addressing information security standards, restrictions on the use of AI, and clawback agreements
Creating production strategies, including the form in which data will be produced, handling native productions, pushing back on what metadata will be produced, and streamlining the production of structured databases.
Leveraging structured data to tell persuasive stories.
Implementing cost-shifting/cost-reducing strategies
Drafting detailed declarations to strategically support burden and relevancy arguments, technical specifications and functionality of complex systems, spoilation claims, and pushback to impermissible demands for “discovery-on-discovery”
Triaging data loss events
Facilitating admission of electronic evidence at trial
Leading multifaceted forensic investigations of data exfiltration
Delineating what ESI should be demanded from our adversaries to “level-the-playing-field” in asymmetrical cases
Hiring and supervising eDiscovery vendors, experts and neutrals
Taking and defending depositions of IT and operations personnel and experts
Addressing all other eDiscovery issues that occur in cases, including spoliation, cost-shifting/allocation, forensics, etc.

Let us know how we can help you navigate your eDiscovery issues.

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eDiscovery

Our global team advances innovative legal theories to help win cases and reduce costs

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Our Experience

We have the experience you need

We provide targeted advice, strategy, and first-chair assistance in these aspects of cases

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