Analysis for litigators on the technical fight.

Metadata—the hidden layer of information embedded in every electronic file—can make or break a case. When litigants fail to preserve or produce ESI in native format, they risk spoliation sanctions, authentication challenges, and evidentiary exclusion. We explain how to preserve metadata integrity, navigate Rule 37(e) obligations, and build defensible workflows that satisfy both the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence.

The 2015 amendment to Rule 37(e) changed how courts sanction lost ESI — raising the bar for the harshest measures, but rewarding reasonable process. Here is what the rule requires and how to stay on the right side of it.

Auto-deleting chats and the migration of substantive conversation onto phones have made messaging the most contested corner of ESI. Under Rule 37(e), the question is no longer just whether data is gone — it is whether the loss was reasonable, intentional, and prejudicial. Here is the 2026 landscape.

The Rule 26(f) conference is where the cost and shape of discovery is set — yet many parties walk in without positions. Here is a practical checklist for arriving prepared.

The duty to preserve attaches earlier than most teams think, and a forgotten hold is the fastest path to a Rule 37(e) problem. Here is how to make the trigger, the notice, and the follow-through defensible.

As cryptocurrency and blockchain technology permeate commercial disputes, employment litigation, and white-collar investigations, counsel face unprecedented eDiscovery challenges. Digital wallets, smart contracts, decentralized exchanges, and immutable ledgers demand specialized preservation protocols, forensic collection methods, and authentication strategies that traditional ESI frameworks never anticipated. We examine the technical and procedural hurdles litigators encounter when blockchain assets become central evidence.

Social media platforms have become critical repositories of electronically stored information in modern litigation, yet they present unique preservation, collection, and authentication challenges that distinguish them from traditional ESI sources. From disappearing content to platform-specific access restrictions, counsel must navigate a complex landscape where spoliation risks are high and authentication standards remain demanding. We examine the practical and procedural considerations that make social media evidence both indispensable and uniquely difficult to manage under the Federal Rules.

How to establish and document chain of custody for electronically stored information so your evidence survives Daubert challenges and satisfies Federal Rules of Evidence 901 and 902.

AI can now generate a video, a voice, or a photograph convincing enough to fool the untrained eye — and persuasive enough to move a fact-finder. As synthetic media reaches the courtroom, the question is no longer whether a recording exists, but whether it is real. Here is how litigators and forensic experts should approach detecting and challenging deepfake evidence.

Generative AI can now produce images, audio, and video that neither a juror nor an expert can reliably tell apart from the real thing. That has reopened a basic question: are Federal Rules of Evidence 901 and 902 still up to the job, or do we need a new rule built for synthetic media? Here is where the debate stands and what litigators should do regardless of how it resolves.

Technology-assisted review is well-established and court-accepted — but defensibility comes from process, not the algorithm. Here is how the methods differ and what makes their use hold up.

Generative AI has moved from pilot to production in eDiscovery — classifying, summarizing, and surfacing privilege at a speed manual review cannot match. The capability is real, and so are the risks. Defensibility in 2026 depends on the controls you put around the model, not the model itself.

More than a decade after Da Silva Moore blessed predictive coding, technology-assisted review is no longer novel — it is expected. But the fights have shifted from whether you can use TAR to how you validate it and what you must disclose. Here is the 2026 state of play for litigators.

Agentic AI has moved from demo to deployed infrastructure — systems that pursue goals, call tools, and execute multi-step workflows with limited human supervision. When an agent acts on its own, the hard questions are who is accountable and whether the decision can be reconstructed in discovery. Here is what changes, and the controls litigators and companies should demand.

When a generative model fabricates a citation or a metadata field, the cost does not land on the software — it lands on the lawyer who filed it. The hallucination tax is the surcharge that incompetence imposes on the whole proceeding, and it is entirely avoidable. The fix is not avoiding AI; it is a disciplined duty to verify.

For decades, financial tracing has been the workhorse of fraud litigation. It still is. But tracing can show that money moved without proving what people knew or intended — and in modern fraud cases, knowledge and intent live in communications, not ledgers. Here is where digital forensics fills the gap.

The obligations that used to sit with large, well-resourced institutions have moved down market. With the amended Reg S-P's June 3, 2026 compliance deadline here, smaller registered firms and the legal professionals who advise them now owe a documented incident response plan and a defensible notification process. The plan is no longer optional, and a written policy alone will not satisfy an examiner.

Email was simple. Collaboration platforms are not — threaded chats, edits, reactions, and links to live files break the old collection playbook. Here is how to collect modern sources defensibly.

Structured data locked inside ERP, CRM, and custom SQL systems does not behave like email or documents, and treating it that way invites spoliation disputes and authentication fights. This piece walks through scoping, preservation, extraction, and authentication of database evidence under the Federal Rules.

The 2015 amendments to Rule 26(b)(1) made proportionality the cornerstone of discovery scope, yet many litigators still struggle to translate the rule's six factors into concrete negotiating positions and cost-containment strategies. We examine how to build a defensible proportionality analysis, when cost-shifting arguments succeed, and how to document burden objections that courts will credit when discovery disputes escalate.

AI-related disputes generate the kind of evidence — opaque models, evolving training data, sprawling unstructured logs — that traditional discovery handles badly. Arbitration, and the JAMS AI Rules in particular, offer a more workable path. Here is how ADR procedures can streamline eDiscovery and keep AI evidence disputes proportionate.

A playbook is the difference between discovery you can defend and discovery you improvise. Here is what one actually is, what it documents, and why ad-hoc process is the most expensive option.

An eDiscovery expert is only as valuable as the opinions that survive the other side's motion to exclude. The December 2023 amendments to Rule 702 sharpened that test — and by 2026, courts are applying it with teeth. Here is how to vet an expert before you retain, not after the Daubert motion lands.

When a case turns on technical data the parties cannot safely share, or on an accounting too intricate for the docket, a judge has a tool many litigators underuse: the appointment of a neutral. Here is what forensic neutrals and Special Masters actually do, and when it makes sense to ask the court for one.