Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in Legaltech News.
On December 1, 2015, new e-discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure took effect. These changes would begin a new era—a monumental decade in the world of data discovery law.
Simultaneously, a new publication and continuing legal education (CLE) webinar launched at Relativity. At the time, the company was called kCura, and the publication and webinar were called the Data Discovery Case Law Year in Review.
kCura took the name of our product, Relativity, in 2017, and, in 2018, the e-book and webinar became the Data Discovery Legal Year in Review due to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
It’s hard to call it the “Case Law” Year in Review when the biggest legal event of the year is not case law.
From the dawn of technology-assisted review (TAR) to the advent of generative artificial intelligence in the law, it’s been an exciting decade for the law of data discovery.
A Legal Decade in Review
On May 15, we’ll celebrate this legal decade with a webinar and the publication of this year’s e-book.
Joining Relativity’s David Horrigan for this auspicious occasion will be the judge who authored some of the landmark decisions of the decade, the Honorable Andrew Peck, who was U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Southern District of New York for 23 years and now serves as senior counsel at law firm DLA Piper; Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Michelle Rick, who serves also as president of the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ); Meribeth Banaschik, partner and EMEIA innovation leader at EY; and Scott Milner, partner and head of the eData practice group at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP. The CLE program is a joint project of Relativity and the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA).
All five speakers have appeared on our Legal Year in Review program in the past, and we’re looking forward to their perspectives—analyzing a decade of the law instead of just a year.
We’ll face the daunting challenge of compressing 10 years of the law into a mere 60 minutes because our field of the law has given us a veritable cornucopia of content.
When Technology Meets the Law
By its very nature, data discovery is the confluence of technology and the law. Thus, it will come as no surprise that technology will frame the discussion.
We’ll start with the impact of technology-assisted review at the beginning of the decade. Perhaps we can even get Judge Peck to share his thoughts on some of his own landmark TAR decisions.
Mobile data has been another major technology topic of the decade, and the mobile revolution has changed the foundation of the practice of e-discovery law. At the beginning of the decade, it was somewhat rare to have extensive discovery of mobile devices. Today, it would be considered legal malpractice in a tort matter not to request mobile data in discovery.
It's not merely collecting data from phones that makes things so fundamentally different. Historically, discovery in litigation was an “asymmetrical” endeavor, where individual plaintiffs had very little data and corporate defendants had endless Bankers Boxes of it. With most people holding supercomputers in the palms of their hands, the division of data has shifted.
Perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts put it best when he wrote in Riley v. California that mobile phones had become “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.”
Needless to say, we’ll discuss mobile data law—with Morgan Lewis’ Scott Milner discussing mobile data from his in-the-trenches perspective as a leading litigator and practice head, dealing with mobile data on a daily basis.
A discussion of mobile data law wouldn’t be complete without an analysis of its cousin, social media, and we’ll cover the law of social media as well.
As the decade of law and technology concludes, we go Back to the Future as we face many of the same legal technology dilemmas we faced with TAR. Now, it’s just with generative AI instead, and we’ll cover those recent developments as well.
The 2015 e-discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, addressing advances in technology and perceived shortcomings of the 2006 e-discovery amendments, helped shape the law of e-discovery in fundamental ways affecting cooperation (Fed. R. Civ. P. 1), proportionality (Fed. R. Civ. P. 26), and sanctions (Fed. R. Civ. P. 37).
International Law and Access to Justice
As she has for the last three years, Meribeth Banaschik will be joining us from Germany to provide the international perspective.
We’ll discuss international legal topics we’ve covered over the past decade. Not surprisingly, the GDPR will be at the top of the list. Has the GDPR made substantial progress in meeting its goals—for better or for worse?
It won’t be all GDPR. We’ll discuss Microsoft Corp. v. United States, a.k.a. the “Dublin Warrant Case.” We’ll also discuss European and other international legal matters.
Access to justice has been another critical issue over the last decades, and we’ve covered how courts and public interest organizations have handled the issue over the last 10 years.
Does technology help or hurt access to justice? Does it level the playing field, or does the cost of technology only widen the justice gap?
We’ll take a look at how technology can be used by underprivileged litigants in cases such as In re Patterson and how much leeway judges should give pro se litigants.
Judge Rick has made the theme of her presidency of the National Association of Women Judges, “access to justice is justice for all.”
One question we’ll ask Judge Rick: “Has access to justice improved or declined over the last decade?”
Join us for the Journey
As we noted above, the CLE webinar, 2015-2015: The Data Discovery Legal Decade in Review and Beyond, will take place Thursday, May 15 beginning at 10:00 a.m. Central time. You can register for free here. Even if you have plans next Thursday, if you register, you can view the program on demand and receive your free copy of the e-book.
Although, as always, this program will be a CLE, you don’t have to be a lawyer to get something out of it. The program will cover useful topics of interest—not only to paralegals, technologists, and other legal professionals—but to anyone who uses technology and has an interest in how the law applies to it.
Beyond that, this journey through the past decade of data discovery law will have useful information for anyone who uses a mobile phone.
Graphics for this article were created by Natalie Andrews.
