litsupport summary for the week ending on 10/05/08

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. What are the pros and cons and other considerations of native production in the MSG format?
A. Considerations:

1. An .MSG is the native file format for Outlook message files. One MSG file
   equals one message in outlook with its associated content (i.e. attachments);
2. This production is allowed, but one can choose to argue if the agreed upon format was TIFF, which may turn out to be another court battle.
   

Pros of MSG (or EML) v. TIF:

1. Searchability;
2. Inclusion of email metadata, headers, etc.
3. There is no need to convert to TIF and OCR. Just be careful with attachments, however, as they may be encoded and not directly searchable without prior extraction;
4. Attachments and embedded files are seen as the person who created or used would have seen;
5. Ability to inspect email threads, verify time zones, make sure one sees actual email addresses rather than just the names displayed in a print job, get all the names and not just the ones that made it to the print job, have a generally more reliable access to attachments;

Cons

1. Since emails are not in an "e-paper" format like TIF, review may require additional production effort (such as "early assessment" technology products), adding Bates numbers, etc.;
   
2. Emails may come in unsorted folders;
3. The production may not have been QC'd;
4. MSG production may include data that was not intended for production. For example, the parent email was responsive, but the attachments were not;
5. Redactions will not appear on the MSG files;
6. By providing information in MSG format, the associated metadata with
   the files may not be preserved;
7. Attorneys can review documents faster when they are in image form as opposed to native further increasing costs to the client;

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner (mkerzner@top8.biz) and edited by Aline Bernstein (aline.bernstein@gmail.com).