In some countries impediments remain, for example rules that hamper document discovery.
But, before they could, the Justice Department petitioned an appeals court to block any further depositions or document discovery in the lawsuit.
They are demanding that for routine assignments like document discovery, work be sent to outsourcing firms and contract lawyers rather than given to expensive associates.
The document discovery and deposition-taking by the corps of lawyers on both sides, running for months, will be rolled out in this showdown.
We are left with what scraps we can get from those private lawsuits lucky enough to get over the high hurdles for document discovery.
Thawley said the attorney general's department "advises that, through an administrative handling error, there was a group of five documents which they failed to hand over to the review team during the document discovery phase".
In fact, the first documented discovery of the noble rot was not in France, but in Hungary, in the late 16th or early 17th century, when growers found that the shriveled, rotten grapes, called aszu, produced a wonderfully sweet, unctuously honeyed wine.
During pretrial document discovery as part of the litigation, internal DLA Piper e-mails surfaced that suggested the firm had a lax attitude about the size of Mr. Victor's bill.
Cases like A.I.G.'s may turn up information in interviews and document discovery that could be helpful to the government, though it is unclear if the Justice Department would seek to reopen closed cases.
He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.
