Discovery on Discovery: When and why it might be allowed

Ronald J. Hedges | Ronald J. Hedges LLC

Ronald J. Hedges is the Principal of Ronald J. Hedges LLC. He served as a United States Magistrate Judge in the District of New Jersey for over 20 years. Ron speaks and writes on a variety of topics, many of which are related to electronic information, including procedural and substantive criminal law, information governance, litigation management, and integration of new technologies such as artificial intelligence into existing information governance policies and procedures.

Among other things, Ron is the chair of the Court Technology Committee of the Judicial Division of the ABA and the co-chair of the NYSBA Committee on Technology and the Legal Profession. He is the lead author of a guide for federal judges on electronically stored information, Managing Discovery of Electronic Information, Third Edition | Federal Judicial Center (fjc.gov). Ron is also the co-senior editor of The Sedona Conference Cooperation Proclamation, Resources for the Judiciary, Third Edition (June 2020), TSC Letterhead (thesedonaconference.org)

Kenneth J. Withers | The Sedona Conference

Ken Withers is the Deputy Executive Director of The Sedona Conference, a non-profit, non-partisan law and policy think tank based in Phoenix, AZ. His main areas of concertation are eDiscovery, Information Governance, and cross-border data privacy. He is the recipient of the 2020 Hon. Shira Scheindlin Lifetime Achievement Award for his work in eDiscovery and is co-author of the most widely used law school textbook on electronic discovery and evidence. Since 1989, he has given presentations before more than 500 judicial, legal, records management, and technology industry audiences and published several widely-distributed papers on electronic discovery, including “Computer-based Disclosure and Discovery in Civil Litigation,” which won the 1999 Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran Award for Best Postgraduate Essay in Information Technology and Law from the British-Irish Legal Education Technology Association; “Ephemeral Data and the Duty to Preserve Discoverable Electronically Stored Information” in the UNIVERSITY OF BALTIMORE LAW REVIEW (2008); “Living Daily with Weekley Homes” in the TEXAS STATE BAR ADVOCATE (Summer 2010); and “Risk Aversion, Risk Management, and the Overpreservation Problem in Electronic Discovery” in the SOUTH CAROLINA LAW REVIEW (2013). From 1999 through 2005, he was a Senior Education Attorney at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington D.C. and contributed to several well-known FJC publications, including the Manual for Complex Litigation, Fourth Edition (2004), Effective Use of Courtroom Technology (2001), and the Civil Litigation Management Manual (2001). Ken received his J.D. from Northwestern University, Chicago, and his Masters in Library Science from Simmons Univesity, Boston.

I. Scope of discovery under Rule 26(b)(1) and its State equivalents | 2:00pm – 2:15pm

II. Requests for, and responses to, information | 2:15pm – 2:30pm

III. “Discovery on Discovery” | 2:30pm – 2:45pm

IV. Case law allowing or rejecting requests for discovery about discovery | 2:45pm – 3:00pm