Posts on legal tech, litigation, & eDiscovery

In The Lean Startup, author Eric Reis emphasizes the distinction between actionable data and vanity metrics. The latter appeals to your ego (total clients served, total dollars earned this year), whereas the former helps you make better judgments...

Cross examination has been described as “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.” 5 J. Wigmore, Evidence § 1367, p. 32 (J. Chadbourn rev. 1974). Although I think e-discovery is a more powerful engine for discovering the...

As a lawyer, I skipped the apprenticeship phase that constitutes the first part of most legal careers. Rather than having a wise elder to show me the ropes, I learned my craft by watching others practice, reading the rules until I nearly had them...

Broad pretrial discovery is one of the key features of the American legal system, and it’s intended to avoid the problem of “trial by ambush” - where one side introduces surprising evidence at trial that the other side has never seen before. But the...

Other than witness testimony, nearly all the evidence worth discovering in litigation is electronic. More often than not, it’s emails, text messages, database records, digital images, metadata, and Microsoft Office files that tell us the truth about...

 I was privileged to have the chance to interview one of my heroes, Craig Ball, a few months ago in a wide-ranging and very interesting talk. It was a lengthy discussion, so we’ve broken the interview into several parts. We cover eDiscovery best...

Lawyers who “do” e-discovery tend to use a lot of hard-core terminology that is bewildering to the uninitiated. That’s unfortunate. Given that e-discovery is discovery, the terminology we use should be user-friendly for all litigators, not just...

I was able to have a lengthy interview with one of my heroes, Craig Ball, a few months ago. This is part three of that interview (check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here). In this portion we discussed best practices for requesting and responding...

I was able to have a lengthy interview with one of my heroes, Craig Ball, a few months ago. This is part two of that interview (check out Part 1 here). In this portion we discussed training on eDiscovery and how much attorneys can do themselves...

There are several time-honored practices in the legal profession whose purpose is a bit hard to understand. Take, for example, the practice of beginning motions with the words "COMES NOW." The only value of starting with these words is that the...