E-Discovery Local Rules

Following on yesterday's post, Maryland is not the only state where federal courts have proposed or enacted e-discovery local rules. As this article shows, at least 32 US District Courts have enacted or proposed special rules addressing electronic discovery.

Suggested Protocol For E-Discovery

Judge Paul W. Grimm of the US District Court of Maryland recently posted this "Suggested Protocol For Discovery of Electronically Stored Information." Although not currently adopted, the document is a "working model" which may at some point be recommended for adoption.

Website Liability For User Posted Content

This Findlaw article by Eric Sinrod discusses when websites will be held liable for the content posted by others on their site. In particular, the article discusses the case of Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC where the website http://www.roommates.com/ was sued by the Fair Housing Councils of San Fernando Valley and San Diego. The plaintiffs alleged that the site's practice of allowing users to filter out potential roommates according to user-selected criteria violated the Fair Housing Act (FHA).

'07 Global Security Survey

Deloitte recently published it's annual review of the state of information security in the financial services industry. The survey includes data from 169 global financial institutions in 32 countries. Key findings include: companies are moving away from a sole focus on shoring up infrastructure against external breaches and are focusing instead on a a layered approach of preventative, detective and corrective controls; respondents identified access and identity management (50%) as their top operational initiative; generic countermeasures (encryption, access control, and network security) are proving inadequate at protecting on-line applications; and in an organization’s attempt to prevent security breaches, people remain the weakest link.