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Contact26 Electronic Discovery Trends for 2008
I greatly enjoyed getting the opportunity last week to give the keynote presentation at the 2007 Lexis Concordance Partners in Excellence. It was a great group of people and I learned a lot about Concordance, its resellers, and related products. I was especially intrigued by the MindTalent Reader / HeadCram program and expect to write about it soon.
I used the presentation as a way to look at some of what I saw coming in the next year or two in electronic discovery. I mentioned 26 trends to consider for 2008 and beyond. These are trends I'm thinking about and, although the list is extensive, I would not say it s complete. I offer a summer of the list to get you thinking about what we might be facing in the near future of electronic discovery. A discussion starter, if you will. These ideas will find their way into my future EDD presentations.
Electronic Discovery Technology Trends for 2008 and (Most Importantly) Beyond
1. EDD as The Tail, Not the Dog - Records Management, Not EDD, is the Driver
2. Underestimating Lawyer Inertia
3. Moving Beyond Metadata and Documents - What is a Document Anymore?
4. Unpredictable Court Decisions - If You Don’t Educate Judges, Judges Will Educate You
5. Technology Outpaces Rules - Problems with Old and New Technologies
6. Changing the Focus to Reasonable Processes and Procedures
7. Data Explosion
8. Court-, Client-, Vendor-, Regulator-, or Lawyer-driven? Are Lawyers the Chokepoint?
9. The New Role of Technology Counsel
10. Unintended and Unexpected Consequences
11. EDD Information Overload and Information Underload - Is It Even Possible to Keep Up with All of This?
12. EDD in the Cloud - Web 2.0, Virtualization, and Beyond
13. The EDD Gap - Some Firms Get It and Many Firms Do Not
14. Who is the EDD Buyer Today and Tomorrow? Who Makes the Call?
15. Will We Reach EDD 2.0 Before Most Get to EDD 1.0?
16. The Coming Singularity – Kurzweil: Does the Pace Only Increase and the Complexity Only Become More Complex (Faster)?
17. The Continuing Shakeout - Expansion from Nontraditional Players
18. Hosted Services and SLAs - Negotiated Agreements
19. Eliminating the Humans? Automated Review and What Belongs in the Human Domain?
20. New Search Frontiers - Foreign Languages, Images, Audio, and Video
21. Unstructured Data - Google Expectations?
22. Outsiders Moving In – Non-EDD Players
23. EDD Goes International - What Happens When Data Located Around the World?
24. Best Practices and Standards – Standards Boards and Guidelines?
25. Integration and Platforms - Open vs. Closed?
26. Collaboration and Workflow – Project Management Gets Bigger
In the presentation, I compared the list above to the 10 items I discussed in my 2006 - 2007 EDD presentations:
1. Records Management, not EDD, is the Driver for Most Clients
2. Toward the One-Stop Shop (or the EDD General Contractor?)
3. Metadata Makes Headlines
4. The Coming Vendor Shakeout
5. Client-Driven and Court-Driven
6. Ethical Wildcards
7. Easy or Scary? Are We Making This Too Hard? Building on What We Know and Analogies
8. Project Management - EDD is All About Project Management
9. Litigation Support Managers – High Growth Area
10. One Big Thing That Must Happen – Communication - Who Must Be Talking to Each Other?
I've also put an edited version of my presentation slides up on Scribd.com, if you'd like to see the whole presentation.
For those of you who like to think about these topics (and especially those of you who have to make decisions and take actions about them), I also recommend some recent articles: Monica Bay's "Defuse Fear and Disarm EDD Vendors" part 1 and part 2 (excellent ideas and quotes, although I disagree with the tone of the title - EDD vendors are some of my favorite (and most knowledgeable) people in the EDD field); Browning Marean's "E-Discovery Looks Like Risky Business" (I note that both Browning and I use Kurzweil's notion of the Singularity); and the roundtable article "The New Federal Rules on E-Discovery: The First 180 Days."
There's much to think about in EDD as we approach the end of 2007.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
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Technorati tags: legal technology electronic discovery edd e-discovery trends
Comments
Dennis, thank you for your kind comments and links to our articles. A minor clarification: My story originally ran in Law Technology News, with the headline "An Undercurrent of Fear." It was picked up by Law.com, our sibling entity, where the staff wrote the headline you cite. (I have no objection to the Law.com headline, but just FYI, it was not the original headline.) The original article can be found here: http://www.lawtechnews.com/r5/showkiosk.asp?listing_id=1680119
Posted by: Monica Bay | October 23, 2007 09:19 AM
Dennis, you have absolutely made my day by mentioning the Singularity.
Anytime I try and bring it up with other lawyers I know they stare back at me with wild eyes like I just told them I'm selling all my worldly possessions and joining the Moonies.
But how can you plan for the future (in legal tech or anything else) without accounting for accelerating change?
Posted by: Jason Jones | October 24, 2007 02:42 PM
I am sure you have heard of the recent Vee Vinhnee v American Express case and the May 4 2007 Grimm Markel American Insurance decision?
Even though article 9 of the Federal Rules of Evidence require authentication of records “as a condition precedent to admissibility,” the recent case and decision above indicate that the existing FRE need to be amended to be aligned with the key challenges and vulnerabilities of ESI.
Where would you position the emerging trend to demonstrate a “foundation of authenticity” of the ESI offered as evidence BEFORE it can be admitted into evidence?
Posted by: Jacques Francoeur | November 28, 2007 05:14 PM