Judge Schiendlin issued an opinion Friday in a FOIA case that was critical of the practice of having government workers collect documents from their files, without strict oversight from counsel. The opinion will likely be cited in discovery disputes because, as Judge Scheindlin notes, “much of the logic behind the increasingly well-developed caselaw on e-discovery searches is instructive in the FOIA search context” (and thus, presumably, vice versa). The government’s brief had argued, “[i]t is . . . unclear why custodians could not be trusted to run effective searches of their own files, a skill that most office workers employ on a daily basis,” to which Judge Scheindlin responded:
Continue Reading Judge Scheindlin Criticizes Unsupervised “Self Collection” of Documents