Reprinted with permission from the Defense Research Institute (DRI). All rights reserved.

Introduction

Coordinating litigation in multiple jurisdictions is no longer an unusual situation, but expected. Whether dealing with a mass tort, a federal MDL, parallel actions in state and federal courts, or any number of other possibilities, counsel now regularly must manage the challenge of litigating similar lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions and often under varying rules. Within those multijurisdictional challenges, discovery is one of the most demanding, and there is no more untested arena of discovery than electronic discovery.

Hoping to provide uniformity in federal courts in the area of electronic discovery, the Rules Committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States has recognized that the transmission and storage of electronic information represents a significant discovery problem. After much study, several drafts, and a decade after the issue was first considered, changes or additions to six Federal Rules involving electronic discovery("Federal Rules") will go into effect on December 1, 2006. See Preliminary Draft of Proposed Amendments to the Federal Rules, at http://www.uscourts.gov/rules/Rules_Publication_August_2005.pdf. These modifications are meant to provide electronic discovery protocols to be applied on a uniform basis in federal courts across the country.1

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