Pittsburgh gets hip, smart and ready. If you view Western Pennsylvania as an obtuse, unoriginal and sleepy commercial backwater–an insular ex-steel region where execs from a tiny white male master class daily bark orders to lower castes before hitting the links–please think again. You’re 40 years behind.
Do see “In re ESI: Local Rules Enhance Value of Rule 26(f) ‘Meet & Confer’ ” by Joy Flowers Conti, a well-regarded U.S. district court judge, and Pittsburgh lawyer Richard Lettieri. The article appeared in the ABA’s The Judges’ Journal, Volume 49, Number 2, Spring 2010. Ironically, most commercial trial lawyers who focus on federal courts know much less about electronically-stored information (“ESI”–routine e-mail, mainly) than they should. Whether you do litigation or transactional work, and especially if your client reps are in-house people or GCs, you’d better know lots.
Judge Conti, and Lettieri, who spent nearly two decades with Big Blue, do know more. Many of the lessons of the Conti-Lettieri article, we might add, are preventative and preemptive for non-litigators. Again, get your transactional people involved. All business lawyers need to get smarter on (1) ESI, (2) Rule 26, Fed. R. Civ. (a short but storied and common sense rule governing discovery generally) and (3) all federal local rules that tweak Rule 26. All three.
