Data stored in Germany needed for multiple US litigation matters

Oct 4 2019

eMerge provided centralized, end-to-end eDiscovery management for a German corporation with global operations involved in multiple federal and state litigations and domestic arbitrations.  The client’s data, which contained PII as well as highly proprietary information, had to be collected, processed, reviewed, and produced in a manner that complied with both US discovery obligations and EU/German data privacy requirements.

The Challenges

• Comply with US discovery obligations
• Discover documents and information needed to develop facts and achieve optimal case outcomes
• Comply with EU and German data privacy laws
• Protect client’s intellectual property
• Meet deadlines and production requirements of multiple parallel litigation matters while ensuring consistency in work product
• Coordinate with five law firms serving as outside merits counsel

eMerge Solutions

eDiscovery Advocacy & Strategy

• Negotiated protocols across multiple matters with different sets of outside lawyers to ensure adequate and consistent protection of client data
• Worked with client legal, IT, and outside privacy and merits counsel to develop defensible, jurisdictionally compliant process for identifying, preserving, collecting, analyzing, transferring, and producing ESI in multiple matters
• Assisted merits counsel with discovery motions, depositions, and briefing
• Provided legal advocacy on eDiscovery issues by leading meet and confer discussions with opposing counsel, providing declarations and legal research, and arguing before an arbitration panel on discovery motions, including motions related to redactions of PII in German custodial data
• Deposed opposing party’s corporate representative to uncover and establish adversary’s discovery process failures

Advanced Technology & Consulting

• Performed on-site installation and maintenance of Relativity appliance in Germany, allowing for data minimization before export to US
• Coordinated and conducted remote data collection interviews to focus data collection; identify potential sources of PII, IP, and other protected data; and track data collection across matters for re-use or supplementation
• Used Relativity appliance to evaluate search terms and filters prior to export, reducing data exported, increasing responsiveness rate, and providing necessary support for negotiations and legal arguments on burden
• Seamlessly and securely managed approved data exports from German-based Relativity appliance to US-based RelativityOne instance

Managed Review & Custom Technology-Assisted Review Workflows

• Leveraged analytics and custom Relativity tools—including email threading, concept clustering, privilege log automation, continuous active learning, and data visualization— to improve accuracy and efficiency of managed document review
• Implemented predictive coding and other technology-assisted review workflows to reduce the volume of documents needing manual review before production by over 150,000 documents and to facilitate efficient review and analysis of an adversary’s massive production of over 3.5 million documents.
• Developed managed review workflows to ensure work product and review tagging was leveraged across multiple matters without duplication of effort or inconsistency
• Staffed and managed multi-lingual review team and developed translation workflow in coordination with client and merits counsel
• Leveraged custom-built deduplication tools to identify duplicate documents in productions received from opposing parties
• Applied custom-built master workspace technology to host one set of client data that fed multiple, separate workspaces used by different merits counsel and allowed work product to be shared as required
• Oversaw all aspects of review, production, and analysis of productions received to leverage knowledge gained at all phases across multiple matters