The Evolving Ethics Of E-Discovery: Raising The Bar For Counsel

Each year, the American Bar Association (“ABA”) hosts the ABA TECHSHOW conference and expo, designed to “bring[] lawyers and technology together.” In its description of the conference, the ABA says, “[g]one are the days when your work had to be done by hand. Most, if not all of your legal work can be accomplished with the help of technology.” With technology advancing at exponential rates and showing no sign of slowing, lawyers today cannot remain willfully blind to the digital universe any more than the 18th-century Luddites could ignore the Industrial Revolution. Technology, innovation, and their myriad implications for the civil justice system—especially but not only in the area of electronic discovery—are reshaping the practice of law in the 21st century, and the near-ubiquitous presence of electronically stored information in modern litigation, often in volumes that are the digital equivalent of many warehouses filled with paper, require proficiency both in the systems that create, store, and retrieve such information and in the technologies and strategies that make it possible to review such information in litigation efficiently, effectively, and without incurring costs that dwarf the amounts in dispute.