The James F. Humphreys Complex Litigation Center is hosting an online bench-bar conference, which will review the GW Discovery Proportionality Benefit-Burden Model. Twelve federal judges and 23 prominent practitioners and other experts will lead discussions with an expected audience of approximately 75-100 practitioners and discovery experts.
The conference will examine a work-in-progress discovery proportionality benefit-burden model, developed under the center’s auspices by teams of lawyers and judges. The model’s structured methodology creates a new analytical framework, which is designed to enhance a party’s proportionality assessments, facilitate discovery negotiations with the opposing party, and better inform judicial resolution of discovery disputes. The framework was derived from Prism Litigation Technology’s Evidence Optix® software.
Following the conference, the center will continue to refine the model and publish it for public comment. The center will also consider developing best practices promoting the use of the model as a standard proportionality-analysis framework for the bench and bar.
On day one, panelists will do a deep dive into the new framework:
- Prioritizing custodians possessing relevant information
- Ranking data sources by degree of burden in accessing information from them
- Projecting discovery cost for each identified custodian by data source
On day two, panelists will discuss putting the new framework into practice:
- Applying the new framework to an individual case
- Why 75-85% recall is used as the standard
- Recent caselaw decisions and how the new framework model might have affected their analysis
- Counsel views on the new framework