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Mike Lieberman

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Mike Lieberman is a partner in Crowell & Moring's Litigation, Health Care, and White Collar & Regulatory Enforcement groups, and co-chair of the firm's E-Discovery Practice. He litigates complex matters in federal, state, and arbitral forums, with a particular focus on commercial health care disputes, class actions, discovery disputes, and fraud cases. Mike's clients include managed care companies, health benefit plans, clinical laboratories, government contractors, corporate and individual criminal defendants, and various other corporate commercial litigants.

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Responding parties have significant discretion to design and deploy technology assisted review (“TAR”) workflows in a manner they determine is reasonable and proportional for the case.  At least that’s what the Northern District of Illinois suggested in its September 2020 ruling in Livingston v. City of Chicago (N.D. Ill. No. 16 CV 10156).

Livingston is a gender discrimination case challenging the City of Chicago’s Fire Department’s (“City”) application process.  The City collected roughly 1.5 million documents in the matter, and based on search terms agreed to following an earlier e-discovery dispute, culled this set to roughly 192,000 emails.  The City then informed Plaintiffs it intended to use TAR – and specifically Relativity’s Active Learning technology – to review this culled data set.

Plaintiffs objected to this approach and argued the City should be required to produce all documents that hit on search terms.  On this point, the Court rejected Plaintiffs’ argument, finding:  “While the City may dump all 1.3 million pages of documents on Plaintiffs with entry of a Rule 502(d) order, it also has the right to perform a review to produce only those documents that are responsive and relevant.”  (Emphasis added.)  In the alternative, Plaintiffs argued that if the City were allowed to use TAR, TAR should be run across the entire ESI collection, not the universe culled by search terms.

Magistrate Judge Young B. Kim ruled that the City was permitted to use TAR on its culled search universe.  In reaching this decision, the Court made several notable findings:Continue Reading Federal Court Supports Discretion In Party Use of Technology Assisted Review

As employees are increasingly working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, many communications that would typically occur face-to-face are now taking place over chat systems, such as Skype, Bloomberg Messaging, and Slack. Chats are often more informal and unfiltered than other forms of written communication such as email, and often do not provide context for the conversation. And with that comes legal risk.

This is because chats may qualify as business documents subject to discovery in litigation—especially when those chats discuss business topics. See, e.g., LBBW Luxemburg S.A. v. Wells Fargo Sec. LLC, Case No. 12-CV-7311, 2016 WL 1660498, at *8 (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 29, 2016) (ordering production of Bloomberg instant messages); JUUL Labs, Inc. v. 4X PODS, Civ. No. 18-15444, 2020 WL 747405, at *14-15 (D.N.J. Feb. 13, 2020) (ordering quarterly reporting during the pendency of a lawsuit based on internal Skype messages indicating defendants would take steps to avoid payment of any judgment that was ultimately entered); West Publ’g Corp. v. LegalEase Solutions, LLC, Case No. 18-cv-1445, 2019 WL 8014512, at *8 (D. Minn. Nov. 22, 2019) (ordering non-party’s production of Slack messages).

Companies are therefore left with the difficult question:  how can you best protect against the risks of online chats, while balancing the business need for them?  The answer may lie in the concept of proportionality.Continue Reading How to Limit Litigation Risk from the Increased Use of Chat Programs During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The District of Columbia Bar Rules of Professional Conduct Review Committee (“Committee”) recently released recommended changes to D.C. Bar rules 1.1, 1.6, and 4.4 to address the increased focus and evolving landscape of E-Discovery and technology in law. All D.C. practitioners should take notice of these potential rule changes, and ensure they stay current—or engage those with appropriate expertise—on these quickly changing areas of practice.

The proposed changes are as follows:
Continue Reading Amendments Proposed To D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct to Address

On September 17, the U.S. Tax Court in Dynamo Holdings Ltd. P’ship v. IRS, 143 T.C. No. 9 added itself to the growing list of courts that have approved the use of predictive coding in litigation.

As we have previously noted, predictive coding or Technology Assisted Review (“TAR”) has increasingly been utilized in large scale document productions in a wide variety of litigation and government investigation matters. However, not all parties and authorities have embraced the use of TAR, perhaps due to litigation’s adversarial nature, or a latent fear that technological tools will somehow miss key documents that a manual document-by-document review would otherwise catch. As the body of cases and research articles grows, however, courts and academics have largely rejected these concerns in favor of the more efficient, less expensive, and, arguably, more accurate document discovery that predictive coding offers. Yet in many jurisdictions, the use of predictive coding in litigation still remains untested.
Continue Reading U.S. Tax Court Approves Predictive Coding for Litigation Use