In e-discovery, it’s astonishing how often requesting parties fail to designate the forms in which they want electronically stored information produced. Equally galling is how often producing parties ignore such designations and convert ESI to costly, cumbersome a tagged image file format just to accommodate creaky review tools and antiquated workflows, or to indulge an extravagant affection for Bates numbers.
Maybe it’s time we ask: Is it malpractice to produce ESI as images? At what point is wasting a client’s money actionable or unethical?
