Our office has recently entered into new provider and referral agreements to help legal consumers find us and learn about our practice more easily. We are now a network provider for CLC, Inc. of Granite Bay, California, a referral agency that coordinates legal services under employee assistance plans across the country. Also, we are listed on the Columbus Bar Association's referral web site at ColumbusLawyerFinder.com. A link to ColumbusLawyerFinder.com is provided on our web site.

Rules for e-documents: (reprinted and adapted from Stratus Insurance news release, 12/18/2006) Many of you maintain your waivers and release forms electronically.  Along with that vital information, you may have emails to customers, or inter-office emails regarding your safety practices, policies and procedures, loss control, or other information that may be requested (or required) in the event of a lawsuit. Under a new rule, which took effect last Friday, U.S. companies will be required to keep better track of their employees' e-mails, instant messages and other electronic documents in the event the companies are sued. They are part of amendments to federal rules governing litigation and were approved by the Supreme Court's administrative arm in April after a five-year review.

Companies and other parties involved in litigation must now produce "electronically stored information'' as part of discovery, the process by which both sides share evidence before a trial. Federal and state courts have increasingly been requiring the production of such evidence in individual cases, and the new rules clarify that the data will be required in federal lawsuits.

Under the new rules, an information technology employee who routinely copies over a backup computer tape could be committing "virtual shredding'' once a lawsuit has been filed. The new rules make it more important for companies to know what electronic information they have and where, especially because of a provision that requires lawyers to provide information much earlier in a lawsuit than before. Without a better sense of what data you have and where, we have seen some companies settle lawsuits in order to avoid the costs of electronic discovery, which is a poor business practice. Better organization of the data can lower that cost and enable companies to avoid settling.

Some companies have paid a steep price for failure to preserve electronic information. In one high-profile case last year, former UBS AG equities trader Laura Zubulake won a $29 million award in a federal gender discrimination suit. The presiding judge penalized UBS for failing to recognize that missing e-mails would end up being relevant to future litigation. Large companies are likely to face higher costs from organizing their data.  Besides e-mail, companies also will need to know about things more difficult to track, like digital photos of your location, information on employee cell phones and on removable memory cards.