I greatly enjoyed getting the opportunity last week to give the keynote presentation at the 2007 Lexis Concordance Partners in Excellence. It was a great group of people and I learned a lot about Concordance, its resellers, and related products. I was especially intrigued by the MindTalent Reader / HeadCram program and expect to write about it soon.
I used the presentation as a way to look at some of what I saw coming in the next year or two in electronic discovery. I mentioned 26 trends to consider for 2008 and beyond. These are trends I’m thinking about and, although the list is extensive, I would not say it s complete. I offer a summer of the list to get you thinking about what we might be facing in the near future of electronic discovery. A discussion starter, if you will. These ideas will find their way into my future EDD presentations.
Electronic Discovery Technology Trends for 2008 and (Most Importantly) Beyond
1. EDD as The Tail, Not the Dog – Records Management, Not EDD, is the Driver
2. Underestimating Lawyer Inertia
3. Moving Beyond Metadata and Documents – What is a Document Anymore?
4. Unpredictable Court Decisions – If You Don’t Educate Judges, Judges Will Educate You
5. Technology Outpaces Rules – Problems with Old and New Technologies
6. Changing the Focus to Reasonable Processes and Procedures
7. Data Explosion
8. Court-, Client-, Vendor-, Regulator-, or Lawyer-driven? Are Lawyers the Chokepoint?
9. The New Role of Technology Counsel
10. Unintended and Unexpected Consequences
11. EDD Information Overload and Information Underload – Is It Even Possible to Keep Up with All of This?
12. EDD in the Cloud – Web 2.0, Virtualization, and Beyond
13. The EDD Gap – Some Firms Get It and Many Firms Do Not
14. Who is the EDD Buyer Today and Tomorrow? Who Makes the Call?
15. Will We Reach EDD 2.0 Before Most Get to EDD 1.0?
16. The Coming Singularity – Kurzweil: Does the Pace Only Increase and the Complexity Only Become More Complex (Faster)?
17. The Continuing Shakeout – Expansion from Nontraditional Players
18. Hosted Services and SLAs – Negotiated Agreements
19. Eliminating the Humans? Automated Review and What Belongs in the Human Domain?
20. New Search Frontiers – Foreign Languages, Images, Audio, and Video
21. Unstructured Data – Google Expectations?
22. Outsiders Moving In – Non-EDD Players
23. EDD Goes International – What Happens When Data Located Around the World?
24. Best Practices and Standards – Standards Boards and Guidelines?
25. Integration and Platforms – Open vs. Closed?
26. Collaboration and Workflow – Project Management Gets Bigger
In the presentation, I compared the list above to the 10 items I discussed in my 2006 – 2007 EDD presentations:
1. Records Management, not EDD, is the Driver for Most Clients
2. Toward the One-Stop Shop (or the EDD General Contractor?)
3. Metadata Makes Headlines
4. The Coming Vendor Shakeout
5. Client-Driven and Court-Driven
6. Ethical Wildcards
7. Easy or Scary? Are We Making This Too Hard? Building on What We Know and Analogies
8. Project Management – EDD is All About Project Management
9. Litigation Support Managers – High Growth Area
10. One Big Thing That Must Happen – Communication – Who Must Be Talking to Each Other?
I’ve also put an edited version of my presentation slides up on Scribd.com, if you’d like to see the whole presentation.
For those of you who like to think about these topics (and especially those of you who have to make decisions and take actions about them), I also recommend some recent articles: Monica Bay’s “Defuse Fear and Disarm EDD Vendors” part 1 and part 2 (excellent ideas and quotes, although I disagree with the tone of the title – EDD vendors are some of my favorite (and most knowledgeable) people in the EDD field); Browning Marean’s “E-Discovery Looks Like Risky Business” (I note that both Browning and I use Kurzweil’s notion of the Singularity); and the roundtable article “The New Federal Rules on E-Discovery: The First 180 Days.”
There’s much to think about in EDD as we approach the end of 2007.
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
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