Arkfeld on Electronic Discovery and Evidence
Michael R. Arkfeld · LexisNexis · Fourth edition, with the April 2026 update; supplied with four cross-referenced Best Practices Guides · 2026
Identifier: ISBN 9781632840394 (print); ISBN 9781632840400 (ePub)
Access and status
Cost
Paid
Costs money to buy outright — a book, a licence, a registration.
Status
Current
Current as at the verification date below. Standards and tools both move — confirm at source before you rely on it.
What it is
A roughly 1,500-page updated treatise covering discovery and admission of electronic evidence against federal and state rules and case law, in eight chapters, with companion Best Practices Guides including an information technology primer for lawyers.
Who it is for, and when
Use it as the reference you consult on a specific question — a form-of-production dispute, a state rule variation, an authentication route — rather than reading end to end. It is the most current general-purpose US treatise on the subject and is updated on a subscription cycle. Examiners will find the IT primer useful mainly as a picture of what the legal audience has been taught.
What it does not cover
It is a legal treatise: it does not teach forensic examination, tool validation, or artefact interpretation, and its technology explanations are pitched at lawyers. It is expensive, subscription-priced, and US-only.
Go to the source
Open at store.lexisnexis.com (opens in a new tab)https://store.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/arkfeld-on-electronic-discovery-and-evidence-grpussku65900.html
Details
- Type
- Book
- Written for
- Lawyers and courtsWorking examinerLawyers and courts, Working examiner
- Author
- Michael R. Arkfeld
- Publisher
- LexisNexis
- Version verified
- Fourth edition, with the April 2026 update; supplied with four cross-referenced Best Practices Guides
- Year
- 2026
- Identifier
- ISBN 9781632840394 (print); ISBN 9781632840400 (ePub)
- Topics
- ediscovery, legal-admissibility, authentication, evidence-handling, spoliation
- Checked at source
Related entries
A consensus commentary on getting electronically stored information into evidence — authentication, hearsay, best evidence, and the certification routes — rewritten for the second edition to take account of Rules 902(13) and 902(14).
A law review article by a federal judge who writes extensively on digital evidence, the Reporter to the Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules, and a leading evidence practitioner, written as Rules 902(13) and 902(14) were being adopted. It works through the authentication routes for electronic evidence and explains what the new self-authentication provisions were designed to do.
The federal sanctions rule for lost ESI. It applies only where information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery, and it reserves the severe measures — adverse inference, dismissal, default — for a finding that the party acted with intent to deprive another party of the information's use.
Two subsections of Rule 902 that let a party authenticate electronic evidence by written certification instead of live testimony: 902(13) covers a record generated by an electronic process or system that produces an accurate result, and 902(14) covers data copied from an electronic device, storage medium, or file when authenticated by a process of digital identification. Both borrow the certification and pretrial notice machinery of Rule 902(11).
A consensus commentary on auto-deleting and disappearing-message applications: whether adopting them is defensible, what happens to the preservation duty when a trigger occurs, and how Rule 37(e) applies when messages are gone by design.