Procedure. There are fads in the law, just like everywhere else. Apologies to Michael Lewis, but there can be no doubt that, in the odd and insular world inhabited by litigators, electronic discovery is the new, new thing, and almost everyone is scrambling to catch up. It is what Y2K was from 1997 to January 1, 2000, but unlike Y2K, it’s not going away anytime soon.
It easy to tell what’s hot in litigation: just watch publications like the National Law Journal and the American Lawyer and look for frequent articles on the “hot topics.” Google “electronic discovery” and you get 354,000 hits.
I’ll be writing more about electronic evidence and discovery, but for now it’s worth noting that if you want to learn about this subject one resource stands tall: Kroll Ontrack.
Kroll makes an effort to track and digest every case involving electronic discovery and computer forensics (look here to see this lengthy document, which can be sorted by topic or jurisdiction). Others, such as Lexis, are not far behind.
You can sign up for Kroll’s newsletter here.
And, if that’s not enough, you can order the monograph authored by two Kroll-employed attorneys, Electronic Discovery: What Every Lawyer Should Know. This 250 page book should make for a pleasant weekend of reading if you feel you really need to get up to speed on this topic.
I should note that the Foreword to this monograph was written by Ken Withers, a friend, attorney, former Bostonian, and for many years now Senior Judicial Education Attorney at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C.