A Framework for Recognizing and Overcoming Implicit Bias in the Legal Profession

If you’re human, you have biases. There’s no way to change this—the human brain is evolutionarily wired to take shortcuts. In the modern world, these shortcuts cause all of us to have implicit or unconscious biases around race, gender, and other inherent characteristics of our fellow humans.

Digital Data Collections in Accordance with the Disclosure Pilot Scheme

The preservation and collection of ESI is the foundation of any disclosure exercise. In the Business and Property Courts of England and Wales, the gathering of ESI must be conducted in accordance with the Practice Direction 51U - Disclosure Pilot Scheme.

ED107 – The Final Countdown: Production Fundamentals

Production is another discovery activity, like collection and processing, in which technical decisions can have logistical and legal effects. For this reason, it is important for practitioners to understand the fundamentals of production.

ED105 – Clearing the Fog of War: ECA Fundamentals

The fog of war is apt shorthand for the state of uncertainty that exists early in a new legal matter: What are the facts? What are the risks? What evidence exists, and what does it show? Early case assessment (ECA) is how we start to answer those questions.

ED104 – Time to Make the Donuts: Processing Fundamentals

The range of potential ESI sources is continually multiplying and diversifying. Processing is how we work with that diverse range of materials without using as many different pieces of software as there are types of sources and how we enable searching and document identification across different source types.

ED103 – The Grand Scavenger Hunt: Collection Fundamentals

With source types multiplying – including challenging sources like smartphones, social media, and collaboration tools, it is more important than ever for legal practitioners of all types to familiarize themselves with the fundamentals of collection so that they can assist in spotting potential issues and identifying appropriate solutions.

ED102 – In the Beginning: Identification and Preservation Fundamentals

Identification and preservation are the first and most fundamental phases of an electronic discovery effort. The duty of (identification and) preservation is a foundational concept in our legal system that grows out of the common law concept of “spoliation,” which is nearly 300 years old.

ED101 – The Evolving Duty of Technology Competence

In discovery specifically, and in legal practice generally, the role of electronically-stored information (ESI) and new technology has grown exponentially over the past decade, as new sources have proliferated, new tools have become normalized, and new communication channels have supplanted the old.