E-Discovery Initiatives at the Antitrust Division
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division

Like the rest of the bar, the Antitrust Division experienced exponential growth in the amount of documents and information responsive to its Second Requests and CIDs. Recently, the Antitrust Division has completed several investigations with productions just under or slightly above one million records. As a result, Antitrust Division spending on its electronic storage capacity has increased substantially. In 2003, the Antitrust Division had a 12 terabyte electronic storage capacity. In FY2008, the Antitrust Division increased its electronic storage capacity to 70 terabytes.

In 2006, the Antitrust Division established an internal working group to address E-discovery issues in civil matters. Matthew Hammond of the Division’s Telecommunications and Media Enforcement Group led this effort. Every civil section and the Division’s Litigation Support staff has a representative on the working group. The working group met, compared electronic discovery practices across sections, discussed innovations as well as problems that had occurred in past investigations, and discussed possible best practices. The working group’s goal was to create straightforward and practical guidance for staff attorneys responsible for negotiating Second Requests and CIDs. We also wanted to provide detailed guidance to law firms and their electronic production vendors about the optimal way to produce electronic data and documents to the Division. This guidance was designed to ensure that parties could avoid producing data multiple times and that the production is in a format that could be reviewed promptly.

The working group continues to revisit electronic production issues. By having members in every civil section, Division attorneys have ready access to a colleague who has devoted time and thought to these issues. In addition, Litigation Support Section now assigns support analysts by section. This has improved the Staff’s ability to negotiate and process electronically produced documents and information. Much as attorneys develop commodity and company-specific expertise, Litigation Support analysts enjoy some of the same benefits. Companies in similar industries tend to use and store electronic data in similar ways. Thus, as attorneys and litigation support analysts gain expertise, many electronic production issues have been resolved and can be addressed in the same manner in subsequent investigations.

+ Questions About Electronic Systems and Back-up/Archiving Policies
+ Direct Access Letter Agreement
+ Summation Database Specifications

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 8:41 pm and is filed under Government and politics, Legal and law enforcement, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.