Second anniversary of revised federal evidence rules

Last week marked the second anniversary of the revised federal evidence rules, otherwise known as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, or FRCP for short. This was a significant change because of the ways it redefined e-Discovery says Craig Carpenter, who is the VP of marketing and general counsel at Recommind.

As a bit of background, there is a rule book that governs evidence rules for all federal courts known as the FRCP. Carpenter says when the courts revised these rules on December 1, 2006, it had a huge impact on litigation and e-Discovery, especially since these rules tend to get adopted by the state courts as well. The first change involved judges ordering the parties, who were used to having an adversarial relationship, to work together during the discovery process. The other, and perhaps most major change, involved explicitly moving electronic documents from a peripheral status to front and center in the discovery process.

Carpenter explained that the change in focus on electronic records was huge because the court explicitly recognized electronic evidence in this fashion, there were still many people who didn't understand its impact on litigation. One of the big side effects of this ruling was that it forced legal departments to work more closely with IT to use technology to sort through the mountains of electronic evidence. You may not be aware of FRCP as a concept, but these changes had tremendous ramifications for anyone involved in content management, whether as a customer or supplier, because it hard coded electronic documents into the legal process and we are still feeling the result today.

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