JuriStaff Releases Plaintiff's Guide to E-Discovery In Support of Upcoming Litigation Against Toyota

Online, March 30, 2010 (Newswire.com) - San Diego, CA (March 24, 2010) - JuriStaff, a leading provider of legal staffing and litigation support services, announced the release of its "Toyota Plaintiff's Guide to E-Discovery," a brief high-level overview of tips and best practices for the hundreds of plaintiffs' attorneys who will be dealing with potentially vast volumes of information coming from Toyota throughout the course of this historic litigation. JuriStaff released this publication during the Toyota Recall Litigation Conference, where plaintiffs' attorneys from across the country gathered to strategize and prepare for legal wrangling with Toyota over the Japanese car maker's recent safety and quality issues, as well as shareholder lawsuits. JuriStaff was one of the sponsors and exhibitors of the recall litigation conference.

A panel of federal judges here will decide on whether the hundreds of individual cases against Toyota will be granted class action status, thereby consolidating those matters into one large case, fought in a single location. Regardless of the panel's decision, plaintiffs will continue to fight Toyota in this case will soon be deluged with mountains of information obtained during the litigation's discovery phase, in which Toyota must, by law, provide the plaintiffs with emails, memos, manuals, reports, and all forms of documents related to this case. Whether or not the plaintiffs will find the one piece of incriminating evidence - the "smoking gun" - for their case will hinge on how effectively and efficiently they can manage and comb through Toyota's information.

"As a firm that helps legal professionals - from law firms and corporate legal departments - review, manage, and tackle large volumes of information in litigation such as this, our primary goal is to ensure that everyone involved (in this instance from the plaintiffs side) in this matter gets a good handle on what will most likely be an overwhelming amount of electronic and hardcopy data from Toyota," said Jim LaRosa, co-founder and partner of Philadelphia, PA,-based JuriStaff. "The earlier that attorneys start thinking about and preparing for the best way to obtain, store, manage, and review Toyota's information, the better chance they'll have of finding useful evidence to support their case. That's the message we're spreading at this conference."

LaRosa also added that, since much of Toyota's information is expected to be in electronic format, plaintiffs' attorneys need to be prepared to address issues that can arise during discovery that, even a few years ago, wouldn't have impacted a case. But in today's litigation landscape, and especially in a case that involves software, mechanical systems, email communications, and foreign-language documents, there is high bar for plaintiffs' ability to understand and coordinate all the moving parts in e-discovery.

"If Toyota hands you (the plaintiffs' attorneys) a million email messages, and they're all in Japanese, they've done their job," LaRosa said. "Now it's your job to manage this data dump. What kind of useful evidence is hidden in that pile of email? What kind (format) of email files are they? How am I going to pore over it all in the most efficient way possible and still leave my team time to actually represent their clients? These are the questions that you'll have to address in litigation of this size, scope, and importance."

JuriStaff's "Toyota Plaintiff's Guide to E-Discovery" is available by emailing [email protected] and requesting a complimentary copy.

About JuriStaff

JuriStaff, Inc. is a leading national provider of customized discovery management and document review services, including e-discovery and document repository solutions. JuriStaff offers a cost efficient single-source provider model of document collection, processing, hosting, management and review.

JuriStaff is certified by WBENC (Women's Business Enterprise National Council) as a woman-owned diversity firm. For more information about JuriStaff, visit www.juristaff.com.