Does RAM Discovery Make Good Law?
Link to article by Thomas Y. Allman and Kevin F. Brady posted on Law.com, December 12, 2007:
The evolution of electronic discovery has been marked by assertions that a party must preserve and produce electronic information that initially seems well beyond what would normally be considered discoverable. The first of these “cutting edge” cases, and arguably one of the most prescient, was the 1980 decision in National Union Electric v. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., 494 F. Supp. 1257 (E.D. Pa. 1980), in which the court held that “common sense” required production of information in machine-readable format over an objection that the information did not exist in the precise form sought and was therefore not discoverable. The court opined that the difference between producing printouts and producing the data in computer-readable form was a “distinction without a difference.” As later explained in Daewoo Electronics Co. v. U.S., 650 F. Supp. 1003 (Ct. Int’l Trade 1986), the court was “not requiring [the party] to create something new or to render exceptional assistance. It [was] simply requiring that an existing body of data be transmitted in a reasonably usable way with a modicum of cooperation.”…
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