Supreme Court of Ohio to match Federal Rules

We had been expecting this around our office, but we were taken somewhat by surprise that it’s come down this quickly. Apparently, though, if all goes according to plan, the state courts will be amending the rules to something close to the current federal rules regarding e-discovery effective July 1.

The one big difference seems to be that the courts will not require a meet and confer, and presentation of a case management plan, simply adding the discussion of electronic discovery issues to the normal pre-trial conference:

The Commission recommends amendments to several Rules of Civil Procedure to accommodate discovery of electronically stored information. The United States Judicial Conference, after extensive work and public comment finalized and the U.S. Supreme Court approved amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that were effective in December 2006. Although based upon the federal rules, the amendments recommended by the Commission differ from them in order to accommodate differences in practical application in Ohio. For example, under the federal rules parties take part in a meeting prior to the first pretrial conference and jointly produce an extensive case management plan. The current Ohio rules do not require this process.

That’s going to increase our workload quite a bit. Currently we don’t have many federal cases, where we absolutely have to use Summation to review electronic documents, but starting mid-2008, I’d expect e-discovery and electronic review to be a major part of almost all our cases, rather than just a small percentage of them.

I think we’re going to need a lot more server storage space…

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