I’ve been thinking about electronic discovery lately, in large part because we’ve been working on the LexThink “Litigation 2.0” event. Expect more details soon and please contact me or Matt Homann and we’ll get you on the mailing list.
I’ve also just finished a new “Thinking E-Discovery” column with Evan Schaeffer and Tom Mighell that will appear on the excellent DiscoveryResources.org website (I’m so pleased that DiscoveryResources.org is a sponsor of this blog, because I am a big fan of the site and appreciate the high quality of information collected there). The column will interest many lawyers – I haven’t yet seen an article that covers the topic we’ve chosen. That’s called a teaser. That word might also apply to the previous paragraph.
But here are two things that caught my attention today that illustrate two points I make in my EDD presentations.
1. The concepts are easy, but the details can get complicated very quickly. Yes, we all know that digital information today can be stored in a variety of places, and that you need to extend your net to capture that information. However, it will often surprise people to find where that data is stored, often right under our noses, and how something once invisible becomes so obviously an issue once someone points it out to us.
Today’s example is copiers and the tip comes from David Ma’s techblawg in a post called “from the ‘another security headache’ department” that highlights a Wired article on the storage capabilities of copiers.
The basic point: many digital copiers contain hard drives. That shouldn’t be a surprise, but who really gives it much thought. Ma and Wired point out the security (and privacy) issues, but it’s apparent that copiers should be added to the list of data sources to be considered and explored in electronic discovery.
2. There are so many tools and vendors in EDD that even if you make it your business to keep up with the industry, it is extremely difficult and I wonder how EDD newbies even know where to start.
Today’s example comes from my favorite EDD blog, Rob Robinson’s Information Governance Engagement Area, in a post called “13 Tools for eDiscovery.”
Here’s a simple test to help you see where you fall on the EDD continuum. Read the list of 13 tools. See if you can determine the differences between each of the tools and when you might use one rather than another. Consider how you would determine what other tools compete with each of these and how you might evaluate how to choose one tool over another. Now decide if the phrase in my title, accelerating complexity, is apt. My guess is that it is.
It’s the practical implications of issues and questions such as these that I’d like to delve into at LexThink Litigation 2.0 with others who really want to understand where we are going and how best to get there. Let us know if you are interested in joining us and tell us about the topics that you are losing sleep over so we can be sure that they are on the agenda and the people you’d most like to hear speak about these topics
And on a related note, as a final thought for this post, check out JP Rangaswami of the Confused of Calcutta blog’s “more musings on the opensourcing of process” – the most thought-provoking post I’ve seen lately, with very interesting implications for the legal, litigation,and e-discovery processes.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
Learn more about electronic discovery at Dennis Kennedy’s Electronic Discovery Resources page.
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