But Canadian IT departments shouldn't lose sleep over e-discovery nightmares taking place in the U.S., according to one lawyer with experience practising on both sides of the border.
"The sky is not falling, No. 1," said Stephen Maddex, associate in the Commercial Litigation Group at Lang Michener LLP in Ottawa, who is a member of the bar in Ontario and Texas.
"No. 2, organization is key," he said. "The more businesses do get organized, the simpler it all becomes."
Broadly speaking, there are two major differences between general Canadian practice and the U.S. federal rules, said Maddex.
One is the scope of discovery. "In the U.S., you can ask for pretty much anything, which is why e-mail has become such an important problem there," he said. But Canadians "don't have that same problem because the scope is narrower."
For example, in the U.S., a company may be asked to file through its entire database and produce everything it has, which could be billions of e-mail messages, he said. "The cost to go through that and figure out what you need and what you don't need to provide is extremely expensive," he said.
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