WebCredenza 2024 Ethics in discovery practice

Discovery can be the most important phase of litigation, directing the course and outcome of the case.  How evidence is discovered, how it is used, and how mistakes in its handling are disclosed and remedied all raise very significant ethical issues. These issues – the risk of mishandling – are increased by the vast growth of ESI, electronically stored information. Litigators have certain obligations that their vendors comply with ethics rules. There are also issues surrounding the use of paralegals in discovery practice.  Failure to ensure ethics compliance during discovery can have a material adverse impact on the underlying litigation and draw an ethics complaint.  This program will provide you with a real-world guide to substantial issues ethical issues that arise in discovery practice and how to avoid ethics complaints.

• Duty of candor to the tribunal during discovery.
• Ethical issues when you learn that a client is dishonest.
• Inadvertent disclosure privileged documents and their handling.
• Ethics in depositions – conferring with witnesses, using video depositions and more.
• Ethical issues in widespread data mining of discovery documents.
• Issues involving metadata in electronic files – documents, email, text messages.
• Attorney-client privilege and security issues of working with outside e-discovery vendors.
• Ethics and social media discovery.

Opinions and positions stated by presenters of MoBarCLE programs are those of the presenters and not necessarily those of The Missouri Bar. This program is intended as information for lawyers in Missouri, in conjunction with other research they deem necessary, in the exercise of their independent judgment.