Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
Ralph Losey on the Evolving World of E-Discovery
September 26, 2011
It was our pleasure last week to attend the Intermountain E-Discovery Conference 2011 and to offer the afternoon keynote. Thanks to Orange Legal Technologies for a wonderful conference and for the honor of being asked to present.
We especially enjoyed Ralph Losey's morning keynote as he thoughtfully examined the state of e-discovery today and its ever-changing nature. Ralph is of course an e-discovery expert, along with being an author, a noted lecturer and (happily) our frend.
He talked about the fact that we have TMI (too much information for the unintiated) – not of the personal kind, but just too doggone much data. We seem to be doubling the amount of data in the world every year and a half. As he also noted, only 2% of cases go to trial – making lawyers more e-disovery practitioners than trial litigators – who would have imagined this 20 years ago?
Ralph is disturbed at how much trouble we have had forming e-disovery teams (not coincidentally the name of his blog). Lawyers, IT specialists and management simply aren't working well together. He emphasized the need for cooperation and transparency. Transparency for Ralph means "aggressive disclosure" – a term of art we hadn't heard before.
Another new term (to us) was "e-discovery extortion" where one party tries to overwhelm the other with requests for so much data that the other side becomes inclined to settle rather than to incur the costs of the discovery. Certainly not desirable, but we too see this all the time.
Thanks Ralph, for the enlightening remarks – and for agreeing to be our guest on an upcoming edition of our Legal Talk Network Digital Detectives podcast on the subject of controversial issues in e-discovery – should be fun – I'll certainly let my readers know when it is posted.
Listen to the Podcast
