Richard Braman was part of a panel discussion a few years ago with some of the most intimidating co-panelists in the legal profession. Moderator Arthur Miller, a respected scholar at Harvard Law, led Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and federal judges, executives and lawyers through a discussion on electronic evidence in litigation.
During the discussion, so many scary statistics were trotted out about the volume of electronic data in litigation today that Breyer commented that the problem of managing all this data is "going to drive out of the legal system a lot of people who belong there."
Braman, founder and executive director of the Sedona Conference, suggested a solution -- that law schools teach lawyers to collaborate during the discovery process instead of the traditional gladiatorial style of litigation. More than one panelist dismissed the idea as impractical and utopian, which really bugged Braman. "I really didn't think I was being utopian or unrealistic, but I understand that's not the way most lawyers view the way things work," he says. "That experience stuck with me, and I decided it was time to put a stake in the ground and say that unless we find a way to solve the dispute over discovery, the legal system will in fact break."
THE PROCLAMATION
His answer is the Cooperation Proclamation. The Sedona Conference, a nonprofit legal think tank, has focused much of its efforts on the preservation and production of electronically stored information in civil litigation. The Proclamation, published last year, is a short document. In several pages, it calls on lawyers to "work more collaboratively during the discovery phase so that greater time and attention (and money) can be spent on litigating the merits of the underlying dispute."
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Source: law.com
By: Jason Krause
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