In Henry VI, Part 2. Shakespeare famously said, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Are computers doing just that? In June of 2012, the Wall Street Journal ran a now watershed article entitled Why Hire a Lawyer? Computers Are Cheaper, which reported on the extensive use of computers for pretrial document review in the Landow Aviation hangar rooftop collapses litigation.

The 2019 eDiscovery Buyers Guide provides key comparison data to help legal professionals select innovative new eDiscovery products quickly and inexpensively. A review of EDT is included in the guide’s 3rd edition. The guide was created to deliver detailed analysis of the primary categories of litigation support products and services.

David Clark is the IT Director at the Utah Bar and active in ILTA at both the local and national levels. He has been in technology since 1985 where he worked for one of the first Novell Distributors and became one of the first CNE's and the very first CNI from Novell. David has been supporting law firms and legal entities since 1989. He has been involved with document management systems since 1990 when SoftSolutions got their start integrating with Wordperfect 5.1. He has done work in many of the largest law firms around the country and was the IT Director for two of the largest law firms in Utah since 1999. Currently, he is the IT Director for the Utah State Bar, which is the regulatory organization for all of the attorneys who practice in one way or the other in the State of Utah. In this interview, David discusses the conference and what he is seeing both in changes over the years and new features at ILTACON19 as well as the technology level of current law firms.

I spent last week at the ILTACON19 conference in Orlando with Team Zebra of #EDT software. Prior to the show, I had written a blog about what I was looking forward to this year and it seems to me now that most of my post was accurate. But rather than do a point by point comparison, I thought I’d use this blog to highlight the main features of the conference. I was struck on the second day there how much I felt at home at #ILTACON19 and I realized that the similarities to life in New Orleans was striking.

It’s July and that can mean only one thing. Okay, besides the celebration of America’s independence, the baseball All Star game as well as hurricane season in New Orleans, it means ILTACON is just around the corner.
ILTACON19 is being held this year from Aug 18th through the 22nd at the Disney World Swan & Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida. Four days of peace and music...no, wait, that was Woodstock. This is four days of what ILTA describes as “...leaders, managers and decision-making legal technologists from small to large sized law firms, corporate and government law departments, academia and the Global 100 firms to discover and evolve successful legal operation strategies for today’s transforming legal industry.” I just describe it as the best technology conference in the world. 

I’ve noted in several blog posts recently that much of my consulting practice involves asymmetrical cases where one side, typically corporate defendants, has the vast majority of discovery. And since my experience is not untypical, what we see in eDiscovery practice is a heavy focus in the eDiscovery world on defense strategy, both in actual practice and educational conferences. Often left out of the discussion is any concept of a strategy for the Plaintiff’s bar.

Data Privacy and Security is now part of every organisation’s compliance requirements. The requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) impose rigorous obligations on and compliance is required if those organisations have an establishment in the EU, if they offer goods and services in the EU, or if they monitor the behaviour of individuals in the EU.

Commentators have bemoaned the fact that legal technology conferences are becoming mostly about solutions for and discussions between the world’s largest law firms and corporations. Most recently, Bob Ambrogi made that point in his column in Above the Law: Legal Tech For The Legal Elite: Observations Of Two Conferences but added in an additional point. Bob noted a tweet from Jeffrey Carr, General Counsel of Univar, that said… “... how about asking what the customer wants - not what residents of #LawLand want or need? Customers want results & outputs — not activity and inputs. They want Delivered Value — Effectiveness + Efficiency + Experience (customer’s)

Jo Sherman and Tom O’Connor spoke on a webinar entitled “What’s Wrong with eDiscovery Today?” We didn’t want this to be another discussion of how TAR or analytics aren’t be used effectively but, rather, a look at the failed promises of technology as well as the human failures of eDiscovery. Both Jo and Tom felt strongly that the overall problem was indeed human, due to the way professionals approach eDiscovery in today's litigation world. Finally, they wanted to discuss how those problems could be fixed.

All the recent emphasis on using AI and predictive coding at the review stage of an eDiscovery project has led many commentators, most notably Craig Ball, to comment that the initial stages of such projects are being overlooked. This neglect of the left side of the EDRM is problematic because failing to collect and preserve efficiently will inevitably led to equally inefficient or even ineffective review. This article will diagnosis that problem, offer some solutions, and then raise some interesting questions.

If you think the looming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is just a European anomaly that won’t have impact ‘across the pond’, think again. In the wake of the Facebook, Cambridge Analytica data breach, the GDPR will trigger a new privacy paradigm that will have broad, international ramifications.

Blindly applying the hammer of keywords in e-discovery cannot be the only tool in the “litigator’s toolkit”.