Are YOU ready for EDD?

Ok, you saw the light, you bit the bullet and digitized your redwells. Now what? A nicely thorough piece on Law.com takes a look at the EDD dilemma.

Law firms and corporate legal departments are accumulating massive archives of electronic data that has to be handled just right in order to avoid catastrophic complications -- and costs.

You may be inclined -- by corporate culture or temperament -- to keep it all in-house. But experts say beware. The range of potentially relevant software, hardware, file formats and protocols is enough to boggle the analogue mind. Moreover, each unique matter calls for its own unique combination of cyber-search technologies.

And judges have not been shy in ordering severe sanctions for e-discovery mistakes. In the e-discovery debacle of Coleman Parent Holdings, Inc. v. Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc, Morgan Stanley was fined millions of dollars for a "willful and a gross abuse of its discovery obligations."

So if you don't know your WI-FI from your WYSIWYG, outsourcing could save time, energy -- and tons of money -- though experts advise carefully establishing relationships with reliable vendors before taking on large cases—because the burden of electronic discovery still falls on you.