Litigation partners Chris Boehning and Dan Toal’s latest Federal E-Discovery column, “Court Reminds That Proportionality Is Central to Modern Discovery,” appeared in the June 2 issue of the New York Law Journal. The authors discuss a recent decision in the Southern District of New York that underscores the importance of engaging with proportionality factors meaningfully from the outset of discovery. In Lam v. State St. Corp., the court denied the plaintiff’s motion to compel discovery that mentioned her first or last name without any connector terms, finding that the request met neither the relevance nor the proportionality requirements under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(b)(1), which sets forth the allowable scope of discovery. Emphasizing that relevance and proportionality are intertwined, the court’s decision indicates that practitioners should be prepared to craft reasonable search and retrieval methodologies, justify the marginal utility of requested e-discovery where appropriate, and provide evidence-based arguments for or against additional discovery, as courts will not hesitate to deny such requests where the burden outweighs the likely benefit. Deputy chair and counsel, e-discovery, Ross Gotler and e-discovery attorney Lidia Kekis assisted in the preparation of this article.
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