Electronic discovery

Yeah.

Now, what's changed the most in eDiscovery since you first started coming to this conference?

I think the biggest change has been the change in the rules and the proportionality and all the e-discovery and tar and all that.

But most recently, I think it's the advancement of artificial intelligence, generative AI, all the problems and benefits that are related to that, the hallucinations and a lot of other related issues.

And I'll leave it at that level of abstraction for now.

One thing that's a little bit weird is if you look at eDiscovery, which I mentioned in the blog post, it the current state of the law and and generally accepted practice is that lawyers can absolutely should in fact in fact must i'm going to say in a in a dis in litigation when we have to exchange a bunch of documents known as discovery for e-discovery when using technology assisted review which nowadays is largely generative ai based um when you've got millions of documents to say, are they admissible or not? Are they relevant or not? And other legal judgments that we want to allow the use of generative AI to do that, to not grind the litigation to a halt, to reduce the cost of litigation.

There's a lot of critical public policy reasons and legal reasons why we want to beneficially use this technology.

What that means, however, is that the lawyer's not exercising human meat brain judgment on every single one of those zillion records.

So this is very much the garbage in, garbage out episode, looking at whether AI can really deliver value if the data beneath it is disorganized, outdated, or simply unmanageable.

I'm David Beck, Head of eDiscovery in London, covering UK NMEA.

I advise on data scoping and management, disclosure strategy, governance and the effective use of advanced review technologies, including technology-assisted review and emerging generative AI, across complex disputes and investigations.

Thanks, David.

it will just process everything it's given and treat it equally.

Exactly, Uti.

And actually, this is where eDiscovery becomes quite a useful lens because we've been dealing with this problem for years.

When data isn't well managed, what you see is lots of duplication, inconsistent metadata, poor naming conventions, lack of classification.

Yeah, I think there is some hesitancy about where all this is going.

In fact, the fellow I was telling him about that I was talking to yesterday about AI said, I hate to sort of be the doomsayer, but I worry about what this is gonna do to the profession, even though right now he's saying this is a great force multiplier for me, what is that gonna do? I remember when eDiscovery came in, I was sort of just getting started in kind of the early to mid 2000s, and we were getting more and more electronic discovery.

And there were a lot of older attorneys at that point, or more seasoned attorneys, I guess you could say, who were like, I don't wanna learn it, I'm out.

I think there are a number of attorneys who are saying with AI, I don't want to have anything to do with this.

So that was true for email.

And then there was another question as, should eDiscovery, so if you and I are in a lawsuit, and you give me a million documents, should we have a human do this, or should we have a machine do it? And people said, well, humans are private, but the machines are not private, so we can't do that.

But of course, everyone used machines to do eDiscovery, and now that privacy concern has gone away.

Same question with cloud computing.

People are saying, no, I don't trust.

Everyone uses the cloud.

That is a concern that goes away.

So now this has just shifted to say, well, AI, is it private or not? And really, each of the three examples that I gave before, email, eDiscovery, and the cloud, each of those relied on contractual obligations from the providers.

Um, I think those are the two things that I left really, really like on top of mind.

Um, and also there's just some fun stuff going on on eDiscovery world, which I am excited about.

Just

that like of the niches, that's kind of a niche that I'm looking at.

Uh, I just think everyone's kind of doing some interesting stuff over there.

Yeah, that's really, really, really cool.

We didn't really give space for eDiscovery.

Um, I'll just anecdotally just add to that.

But yeah, that is a lot to be combining e-discovery and everything else into one product.

Yeah, eDiscovery has always been in the background for us.

It's something I'm personally very passionate about.

In my career practicing, I had this incredible string of cases that were all won because of eDiscovery.

by pushing really hard, knowing what to ask for, knowing how to deal with native files, I would uncover evidence that would essentially prove my client's case to the point where the other side was just compelled to settle for exactly what we were asking for.

And we've always wanted to play some role in helping people be able to do that more often without spending the kind of money that big corporations are often spending on eDiscovery.

So there's still a little bit of a twinkle in our eye about eDiscovery.

And our product increasingly does some really useful eDiscovery type of workflows.