This is the second in a series of articles on the practical implications of the 2015 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Unless Congress takes action to block them, they will go into effect on Dec. 1, 2015.

From an e-discovery perspective, the most impactful amendments are to Rule 1 (cooperation), 26 (proportionality and scope of discovery), 34 (objections) and 37 (sanctions). The first article in this series (“A New Era of Cooperation for E-Discovery Rules?,” Daily Report, Oct. 12, 2015)concerned the changes to Rule 1. This article will focus on the changes to Rule 26 regarding proportionality and the scope of discovery and end with three takeaway observations.

As noted in the first article, e-discovery and the age of “Big Data” has fundamentally changed civil discovery. The most notable change is that individuals and entities have volumes of information that were unheard of in the days of paper discovery. The upshot is that discovery costs have soared, lawsuits have become bogged down in an ocean of produced information, and there is now a growing number of lawyers, like me, who focus their practice on e-discovery.