Good Cause is Bad Medicine for the New E-Discovery Rules‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION A package of amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure intended to address issues raised by discovery of electronically stored information ("ESI") went into effect on December 1, 2006. (1) Enactment of these e-discovery amendments occurred as a result of "intensive and extensive study" of discovery of ESI by the Civil Rules Advisory Committee. (2) The Advisory Committee concluded that discovery of ESI differs in several important ways from conventional discovery of hard-copy documents: ESI "is retained in exponentially greater volume than hard-copy documents; is dynamic, rather than static; and may be incomprehensible when separated from the system that created it." (3) According to the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, each of these differences makes e-discovery more time-consuming, more burdensome, and more costly than conventional discovery. (4) The Rules Committee further concluded that the package of e-discovery amendments could address these problems. (5)