Nassau County's ESI Discovery Guidelines

Judge Timothy Driscoll of the New York Supreme Court for Nassau County (part of Long Island) has been active in ruling on electronic discovery issues, and is the co-chair of the New York State Chief Administrative Judge’s Working Group on Electronic Discovery. Judge Driscoll's influence can likely be seen in the Guidelines for the Discovery of Electronically Stored Information of the Commercial Division in Nassau County. See: https://www.nycourts.gov/courts/comdiv/PDFs/Nassau-E-Filing_Guidelines.pdf The guidelines are helpful for specifying 15 topics to be discussed at the preliminary court conference:

1. Disagreements on the production of ESI.

2. Scope of requests and objections to ESI production.

3. Form of production of ESI - single or multiple formats.

4. Identification of not reasonably accessible ESI and the costs and effort involved in its retrieval.

5. Methods to identify the produced ESI (e.g. bates stamping).

6. Redaction Techniques.

7. Custodian names, titles, and job responsibilities.

8. Cost-shifting or sharing issues.

9. Search protocols.

10. Depositions of Information Systems personnel.

11. Two Tier ESI discovery (initial search of key times or custodians, followed by a broader search) needed?

12. Protective or confidentiality orders.

13. Forensic specialists or other eDiscovery experts needed?

14. Log protocol for withheld data.

15. Native files integrity maintained with meta data.

This is a good outline for what parties can expect to deal with at a preliminary conference.

Use the mnemonic MRS P FINDS DL FT CC - MRS Production FINDS DownLoads by the FooT and the Cubic Centimeter.