Practice Strengths

Leaders in finance, manufacturing, consumer products and other industries turn to BakerHostetler’s E-Discovery Advocacy and Management Team for practical solutions to their most complex electronic discovery and data challenges. Revolutionary innovation in digital technology has transformed the way corporations develop products and services, manage global operations and interact with employees, suppliers, customers, competitors and regulators. It has also fundamentally altered the creation and discovery of evidence in modern litigation.

Rather than treat electronic discovery, or “e-discovery,” as a back-office litigation support function, BakerHostetler recognizes that risk and burden can most effectively be addressed through:
 

• focused advocacy by seasoned litigators who are skilled in current discovery law and practice;
• disciplined project management by experienced litigation support professionals; and
• the deployment of leading commercial and proprietary software, technology assisted review tools and data management processes by those who understand their benefits and limitations.

Our team manages one of the largest and most complex data sets at issue currently in any single litigation in the United States—the SIPA liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. But discovery solutions are not cookie cutter, and we scale our technology and procedures to deliver cost-saving efficiencies to matters of all sizes.

Thought leadership in action. Applying deep knowledge of modern discovery law, our professionals offer:
 

• Successful advocacy of staged discovery that is proportionate to what’s at stake in the litigation, moving beyond the broad concept of mere relevance and focusing first on the information needed to resolve actual disputes. Our case studies demonstrate that this approach can reduce discovery burdens by 80 percent before even deploying modern document review processes and software.
   
• Current document review protocols and tools to reduce the cost of “eyes on the page.” Whether clients use members of our highly-trained in-house review team – strategically based in lower-cost regions – or work with review vendors, BakerHostetler’s E-Discovery Advocacy and Management Team can carefully manage review to ensure it is cost effective. We deploy our knowledge of data sets and technology to smartly cull documents that do not require the cost of human review. And we are confident enough in our ability to analyze and characterize client data that, in many cases, we can offer clients a fixed price – adding certainty that is rare in today’s multibillion-dollar e-discovery industry.
   
• Focused, practical, company-wide litigation and discovery response programs that are repeatable and defensible. Rather than build these programs based on unfocused and quickly outdated data-mapping exercises, we concentrate instead on the client’s litigation profile and the information that is typically relevant in the type of litigation the company is most likely to face. Our team members serve as trusted advisors to FORTUNE 500 companies on the creation and deployment of discovery response programs covering the life-cycle of records, including document creation, legal hold preservation and legacy data retirement.
   
• Skilled defense of clients when things go wrong. We want to position our clients to be on offense in the discovery process, but the sheer volume of information in most organizations has raised the likelihood of process breakdowns within the company. Rather than allow these situations to subsume the merits of the case, our professionals take a disciplined approach to failure assessment and incident response – based on an understanding of the expectations of the courts in these difficult situations – to minimize the likelihood and severity of sanctions.

Our experience is not limited to litigation, internal investigations and government enforcement actions in the U.S. The E-Discovery Advocacy and Management Team has extensive experience with overseas litigation, international privacy and bank secrecy law, and all forms of discovery devices, including Letters Rogatory, Letters of Request and discovery requests under Section 1782 of title 28 of the U.S. Code. We handle subpoenas and information requests from Congress, the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the United States Environmental Protection Agency and other governmental agencies.

From technical consultants to discovery managers to e-discovery advocates who direct the discovery process in the trenches of complex litigation, our team members help clients manage both the risks and opportunities created by modern procedural rules and the variety of corporate responses to those rules.