Law and technology 1

The first of two interesting facts in the July copy of Wired.

From John Bringardner, Winning the lawsuit, in which he notes that ‘in the US a pretrial discovery request today can generate nearly 10,000 times more paper than 10 years ago’,

So how has this evidentiary deluge changed the practice of law? Consider that five years ago, newly minted corporate litigators spent much of their time digging through warehouses full of paper documents. Today they’re back at their desks, sorting through PDFs, emails, and memos on their double monitors – aided by semantic search technologies that scan for key-words and phrases. In another five years, don’t be surprised to find juries chuckling over a plaintiff’s incriminating IMs, voice messages, video conferences, and Twitters.

I see it coming sooner.