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2004 e-Discovery Rulings Recap

By Whitney Adams
November 29, 2004

The courts in 2004 issued a plethora of important rulings on e-discovery, most of which were not good for businesses. The rulings generally require companies to make greater efforts to protect potentially discoverable records, allow these records to be more easily obtained through discovery, and restrict the format in which these records must be produced.

Several of the year's most important court decisions concerned the use of records-retention policies in the face of potential lawsuits. The traditional rule was that a company that reasonably expects to be involved in a litigation could nevertheless allow records relating to that potential litigation to be destroyed pursuant to a properly adopted records-retention policy. See, Stevenson v. Union Pacific R.R. Co., 354 F. 3d 739 (8th Cir. 2004); Thompson v. HUD, 219 F.R.D. 93 (D. Md. 2003).

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