If you don’t work as an interdisciplinary e-discovery team, you will likely lose the game of e-discovery. You will make mistakes and get sanctioned, or pay too much, or both. Lawyers need to work with IT, techs, and others to do e-discovery right. But that is not enough. Even if you have a team, if your team doesn’t cooperate with the opposing players, or at least try to and go to the referee if they refuse, you may still lose. Teamwork and cooperation are the first two of the three pillars of e-discovery. The third is metrics and technology. You can probably avoid sanctions without the third pillar, but not high costs, and so you may win, but your client will still lose. This week in the eleven minute video below (yes, I know, it’s a minute too long) I explain the first two pillars of e-discovery. Next week I’ll tackle the third. Open the video below and watch in full-screen HD.
e-Discovery Team
LAW and TECHNOLOGY – Ralph Losey © 2006-2023
About the Blogger
Ralph Losey is a Friend of AI with over 740,000 LLM Tokens, Writer, Commentator, Journalist, Lawyer, Arbitrator, Special Master, and Practicing Attorney as a partner in LOSEY PLLC. Losey is a high tech oriented law firm started by Ralph's son, Adam Losey. We handle major "bet the company" type litigation, special tech projects, deals, IP of all kinds all over the world, plus other tricky litigation problems all over the U.S. For more details of Ralph's background, Click Here
All opinions expressed here are his own, and not those of his firm or clients. No legal advice is provided on this web and should not be construed as such.
Ralph has long been a leader of the world's tech lawyers. He has presented at hundreds of legal conferences and CLEs around the world. Ralph has written over two million words on e-discovery and tech-law subjects, including seven books.
Ralph has been involved with computers, software, legal hacking and the law since 1980. Ralph has the highest peer AV rating as a lawyer and was selected as a Best Lawyer in America in four categories: Commercial Litigation; E-Discovery and Information Management Law; Information Technology Law; and, Employment Law - Management.
Ralph is the proud father of two children, Eva Losey Grossman, and Adam Losey, a lawyer with incredible litigation and cyber expertise (married to another cyber expert lawyer, Catherine Losey), and best of all, husband since 1973 to Molly Friedman Losey, a mental health counselor in Winter Park.
As lawyers, we have an unfortunate tendency to wish either to control or to abdicate. Add to this, among many older lawyers, a residual keyboard taboo and, among many lawyers of all ages, poor or no programming skills, and teamwork within an eDiscovery team becomes difficult.
I suggest that for litigators the duty of competent representation will be increasingly hard to carry without an understanding of a key defined term: algorithms + data structures = programming (N. Wirth, 1976). It does not mean that lawyers have to be able to write code, but they will need to be able to read and understand it.
Fortunately, for men and women who pride themselves of parsing, it’s less difficult than the Blue Book.
NOTHING is attainable without teamwork and cooperation, except playing solitaire 🙂