In my CLEs around the country I usually mention at some point my three keys to successful e-discovery. They are the top three things to do in order to do e-discovery right. All involve fundamental changes to the way most lawyers practice. For that reason, these suggestions seem novel and difficult, if not impossible to most lawyers today. But in the future I am confident that they will seem common place, even obvious. They may seem like that to you already because, as one of my readers, you are probably in the vanguard of e-discovery already. Certainly most experts that I have talked to already embrace these three suggestions as part of their tool kit, even if they do not pick them as their top three. Still, should you disagree, feel free to say so in the comments section at the end.
These three fundamental changes to legal practice must be made if we are to continue to resolve disputes based on the facts, primary among them the writings of the parties. We can no longer practice law with paper documents and paper mentality the way Abraham Lincoln did. The world no longer works that way. It is all digital now. The legal profession must change with society and embrace technology, not run from it. If you do not change your practice to do at least these three things, then e-discovery will be an expensive morass. Put another way, if your company or law firm already finds electronic discovery to be a problem, and most do, then these three new activities provide a way out. They are the keys to your successful, economic deployment of e-discovery.
This video provides a very short digest of this message and, as we all know, sometimes less is more. By the way, if I had to add a fourth step, it would be education. But that should already be obvious to my usual readers and certainly was to the University of Florida law students in this class to whom I was talking.
Click on the four arrows in the bottom right corner of the video for full screen HD view.
Please leave me a comment below that is in any way related, as I am interested in what all of my readers have to say. If it is an off-topic comment, feel free to send me a private email at ralph.losey@gmail.com.
[…] Ralph Losey’s 1 Minute Summary of the 3 Keys to E-Discovery go to source […]
[…] Losey has a quick video rundown of his three keys to successful ediscovery. Law firms need to start using technology to their advantage and work with their technology […]
[…] The Economist article notes that a new kind of professional is emerging, one very important to business, and I suggest also to law, the data scientist. This insight supports my position that metrics, including multimodal search, is one of the three pillars of e-discovery best practices. […]