E-Discovery: California Gets Into The Act

Reprinted with permission from FindLaw.com

More and more, information is saved on hard drives rather than hard copies. Thus, it is not surprising that now the heart of discovery efforts in civil litigation more often focuses on the discovery of electronically stored information.

In 2006, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended in an attempt to address and grapple with issues that arise in the e-discovery context in federal cases. And now state legislatures are getting into the act to deal with such issues in state court cases.

Indeed, last week Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law California's Electronic Discovery Act. The Governor had vetoed similar legislation last year, and this is the first time that California's discovery rules have been revised in a significant way in a couple of decades.