Attending an inspired session at LegalTech New York orchestrated by Ralph Losey and Jason Brown who presented opposing approaches to eDiscovery for a hypothetical client played by Jeane Thomas and then followed by an enacted opinion delivered by no other than Hon. Paul W. Grimm (Mancia decision) I was struck by one particularly interesting comment. Ralph, who represented the multi-modal approach of eDiscovery (concept search, linguistic discovery) contrasting Jason’s keyword search approach, said that council and IT needed to break down barriers of communication and work closer together to deal with the escalating costs of eDiscovery and the issues of proportionality. Ralph invoked Erle Stanley Gardner’s character of Paul Drake (played by William Hopper in the classic TV series) of the Perry Mason novels. Paul, as a private investigator, was an essential teammate of Perry in the discovery of truth. His point was that just as Perry collaborated with Paul, the modern attorney needs to work closely with trusted technical staff to develop appropriate approaches to eDiscovery that are proportional to the matter at hand.
As the legal community grapples with the exploding amount of information, attorneys will need to remove the artificial walls which hereto resulted in eDiscovery responsibilities being tossed over to the technocrats. Moreover, the technical resources need to invest the time to gain a deeper understanding of the attorney perspective. Since increasingly relevant evidence is found in modern communication methods (think about SMS, twitter, facebook) attorneys are necessarily forced to embrace technology. Since increasingly much of this information is in the cloud, attorneys will need to get comfortable with this rapidly expanding platform.
I am confident that this transition will occur at an increasingly faster pace. Moreover, it will not just be limited to the newest generation of attorneys who can be said to be part of Prensky’s Digital Natives but also those who are Digital Immigrants (www.marcprenskey.com). I anticipate that Software as a Service like aLawPractice.com will help you make the transition if you have not already.
The team approach is a must for successful e-discovery. I call it one of the three legs of the e-discovery stool. For an even older model than Perry Mason and Paul Drake, I also sometimes speak of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. A more current model is probably found in the ESI television series. The idea is that our world today is too complex to solve significant problems without the help and support of a whole team. Similar to the notion that it takes a whole village to educate a child.
Attending an inspired session at LegalTech New York orchestrated by Ralph Losey and Jason Brown who presented opposing approaches to eDiscovery for a hypothetical client played by Jeane Thomas and then followed by an enacted opinion delivered by no other than Hon. Paul W. Grimm (Mancia decision) I was struck by one particularly interesting comment. Ralph, who represented the multi-modal approach of eDiscovery (concept search, linguistic discovery) contrasting Jason’s keyword search approach, said that council and IT needed to break down barriers of communication and work closer together to deal with the escalating costs of eDiscovery and the issues of proportionality. Ralph invoked Erle Stanley Gardner’s character of Paul Drake (played by William Hopper in the classic TV series) of the Perry Mason novels. Paul, as a private investigator, was an essential teammate of Perry in the discovery of truth. His point was that just as Perry collaborated with Paul, the modern attorney needs to work closely with trusted technical staff to develop appropriate approaches to eDiscovery that are proportional to the matter at hand.
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