FRCP challenges counsel.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: UP FRONT: News, Trends & Analysis - Federal Rules of Civil Procedure - Survey

The second-annual LexisNexis Corporate Counsel Survey, conducted during the Association of Corporate Counsel Annual Meeting in late October 2007 and released in November 2007, revealed the views of corporate counsel regarding the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Forty-four percent of the 76 corporate counsel polled said their companies were not prepared for the revised federal rules for e-discovery when they became effective. Since then, however, they said their firms have made strides to ensure better preparation for litigation and discovery. In fact, 61 percent said they were now very or somewhat confident that they are fully compliant. Yet 30 percent still said that they were not very confident and 5 percent said that they were not at all confident.

The survey suggests that confusion still exists regarding certain elements of the new rules. For example, 70 percent of corporate counsel attorneys said they believe that the rules require them to produce documents in their "native file" format. This is an incorrect assumption, up 27 percent from last year's response to the same question.

According to the survey, provisions of the new federal rules have increased corporate workloads. For example, 73 percent of respondents said that their company has seen an increase of up to 20 percent in discovery workload as a result of the new rules since their implementation in late 2006. In addition, 76 percent of corporate counsel attorneys surveyed said the new rules have not helped...