Articles Posted in Technology

Preston Gates & Ellis has launched Electronic Discovery Law (www.ediscoverylaw.com).  The site offers case listings and summaries, pulls together news items, and other material about using software to find, search, and sort electronic files.  Since the received wisdom is that upwards of 60% of the cost of litigation comes from discovery, this topic of e-discovery has swarmed all over the in0house world.  All we read about are companies springing into existence that can help departments.  Ironically, the more techniques there are for extracting material from instant messaging (I think that is not at all possible because the messages are not stored, but I would welcome some education on that supposition), email, PDAs, voice mail, and old-fashioned files of every description, the more litigants will seek electronically smoking guns, and the higher costs will go, and thus the more interest there will be in such techniques…..

I continue to be struck by how little the wealth of technology has penetrated law departments. Sure, everyone uses e-mail and many create their own documents. But as for matter management or extranets or other applications (dictation software, document assembly, graphics in PowerPoint or Excel), there is almost nothing penetrating. And this despite years of preaching about productivity, huge amounts of marketing by vendors, and a rising sense of awareness generally that goes with younger lawyers.

I think the core problem is that, for most in-house lawyers, they know what’s on their plate, they don’t care much about outside counsel cost control, and words are sufficient (compared to text and other abilities such as hypertext). Stated differently, there is no killer app.