There are reasons why construction litigation eDiscovery fails. Amanda Fong of Nextpoint discusses them and what to do about it here!
The article titled (wait for it!) Why construction litigation ediscovery fails and what the best legal teams do differently, available here) discusses five specific mistakes that cause construction litigation discovery budgets to blow up. Here’s one of them.
Waiting too long to define preservation scope
The most expensive ediscovery mistakes in construction litigation don’t happen during review. They happen weeks or months earlier, when no one defines what to preserve before the data starts disappearing.
Construction matters pull in general contractors, multiple subcontractors, dozens of employees across separate entities, and third-party consultants. Each one generates data in its own systems. When any part of that structure gets sued, the potential preservation scope is enormous. Without a strategy, legal teams go one of two ways: they over-preserve, collecting everything and paying to process and review data that has no relevance, or they under-preserve, miss critical custodians, and face sanctions.
Courts increasingly require parties in construction cases to exchange search hit reports, which show how many results a keyword search returned across a custodian set. Teams without the tools or processes to generate those reports accurately can violate a court order before producing a single document.
What the best teams do:
Treat the first conversation about a new construction matter as an ESI consultation. Before collections begin, name your custodians, map where their data lives, catalog what systems the project ran on, and pin down your preservation obligations. That work pays off at every stage that follows.
So, what are the other four reasons why construction litigation eDiscovery fails, and what do the best teams do about them? Find out here, it’s only one click. Clicking is a great way to construct a sound approach! 😉
So, what do you think? Do you experience challenges in construction litigation? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Image created using Bing Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot working construction on a building”.
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