Court Orders Production of Files in “Usable” Format

On May 24th, the Alberta Court of the Queen’s Bench ruled that, in certain circumstances, meaningful disclosure requires the production of native electronic files.   Background and Arguments In Bard v Canadian Natural Resources,[1] the plaintiffs brought a motion requesting, amongst other things, that the court order the defendants to deliver native Excel spreadsheets. The defendant had provided the data in TIFF image files as agreed to by the parties in the discovery plan. The plaintiffs claimed that TIFFs were not a “usable” format.  

New EU-US Privacy Shield

On February 2, 2016, the European Commission announced that it had reached an agreement in principle with the United States on a new framework for data transfers.   This new EU-US Privacy Shield is necessary because of the October 2015 Court of Justice of the European Union decision which invalidated the Safe Harbour arrangement (discussed in further depth in this previous article).   On February 29, 2016, the European Commission released a draft “adequacy decision” and the legal text for the new agreement. The adequacy decision establishes that the safeguards under the Privacy Shield will offer equivalent data protection standards

Crystal O’Donnell’s EDRM interview

A recent interview of Crystal O’Donnell, Founder and President of Heuristica, can be found on the website of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). In the interview Crystal discusses the unique approach that Heuristica takes to e-discovery, her involvement with Sedona Canada, and differences between Canadian and American procedural rules relating to electronically stored information.