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Don’t Let Your Opponent Bury You Under a Mountain of Business Records in Lieu of Answering Interrogatories

By Isaac Thorp

You have served interrogatories about the defendant’s construction of a defective roadway. The defendant responds to several of them by stating, “[T]he information sought by this interrogatory may be ascertained by a review of the construction diaries and other records. These documents are available for review, inspection and copying.” You arrive at defense counsel’s office to inspect the documents, and you’re directed to a storage room that contains 200 unlabeled boxes. “Good luck!” says his secretary, as she closes the storage room door. Is this proper?

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E-Discovery As Part Of a Winning Strategy For Every Firm

By Joyce Brafford

You have clients. They use email. They send text messages. They create documents. They take pictures. They make phone calls. They send messages on social apps. Imagine if one of your clients came to your office, and told you they were being sued. And all those personal and professional messaging systems were sources of potential evidence. How in the world would you avoid spoliation of evidence? How would you ensure you were gathering all the materials required by a request for discovery? How could you manage all the data you needed to sift through from the opposing party?

It’s a huge challenge. And as our clients create more data every day, there’s no excuse to be puzzled by e-Discovery. To that end, we’re asking Kelly Twigger of ESI Attorneys to tell How to Use e-Discovery and Win at a one-hour webinar on Nov. 29. To help us prepare for the program, Kelly is sharing answers to three essential questions anyone who needs to know more about e-Discovery should ask.

Kelly Twigger

1. Why does every lawyer need to understand e-Discovery?

Put simply, all of the evidence your clients need to prove their cases is electronic. The difference between paper and ESI (electronically stored information) is that clients used to be able to tell what was important and hand it to their attorney. They usually kept it all together or were able to find it easily. Now they can’t always find it all in all the systems that we use to create, send and receive ESI, and it has become the attorney’s job to know the right questions to ask to find out where it’s located, how to search it and how to get at the data for use in a case. It’s a very new complex and ever-evolving discovery process that we are facing. You can’t do discovery without ESI anymore and how you approach e-Discovery can make or break your case.

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Local Governments vs. Big Pharma: A New Wave of Litigation Alleges Liability For the Opioid Epidemic

By Drew Erteschik,[1] J.M. Durnovich and Cosmo Zinkow

        

Introduction

The opioid epidemic is an American tragedy.  It is difficult to convey the breadth of the epidemic with a single statistic, but let this sink in:  For every person killed by gun violence, three people will die from an opioid overdose.[2]

As the epidemic worsens, local governments are scrambling for solutions.  They are also scrambling to keep up with the costs—the public health, law enforcement, public employment, and other costs that the opioid crisis has left on their doorstep.  With insufficient financial assistance from Congress and state legislatures to cover these costs, local governments are turning to the courts.

Across the nation, cities and counties are suing opioid drugmakers and distributors.  These lawsuits seek to hold drug companies accountable—at least in part—for the opioid epidemic.  No North Carolina city or county has filed a lawsuit of this kind yet, but they surely will soon.

The authors of this article—two litigators and their future colleague—would like to explore this litigation in three parts:

The first part gives a brief overview of the costs of the opioid epidemic on North Carolina and its local governments. The second part discusses state and local government litigation against drug companies in other states—essentially a preview of what future litigation in North Carolina might look like. The third part gives the authors’ predictions for the litigation, along with recently released information about a number of large settlements.

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Libations and Litigation Are Twin Passions for NCBA Member Deborah Sperati

NCBA Members In Focus 

Ask Deborah Sperati if she would rather run a craft brewery or practice law as a partner at Poyner Spruill, and she answers with a question: “Why choose when you can do both?”

As co-founder, legal counsel and chief cultural officer of Koi Pond Brewery in Rocky Mount, Sperati blends her passion for craft beer and her 18 years of experience as a civil and commercial litigator. A North Carolina native who grew up in Greenville, Sperati earned her law degree from UNC School of Law and has practiced for 18 years. At Poyner Spruill, she leads the Brewery, Winery and Distillery Practice Group, which offers her critical insight into the challenges facing the state’s growing group of beer, wine and spirits artisans. Here, she offers some insight on how she keeps these dual pursuits alive.

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