In the single generation since computer litigation support became commonplace in American firms, the role of the lawyer as the primary agent in organizing and analyzing pretrial discovery has faded from foregone conclusion to marginal factor.
Ostensibly, this shift away from lawyers personally conducting their own trial preparation became necessary because of the vastly greater scale of information now found in discovery. As electronically generated communications and documents became the mainstay of personal and corporate communications, word was that lawyers could not keep up with so much information and that computer litigation support technologies would solve the problem of analyzing so many documents.
After wading neck deep in electronic discovery for the past decade, lawyers have realized that there is a gap -- more like a chasm -- between what a string of binary code can make a computer do with information and what a dual-hemisphered lawyer's brain needs to accomplish with it in preparing for trial. The honeymoon with legal computing is over -- the giddy days when technology was the object of everyone's desire, adored but never to be judged. What kind of meaningful relationship is ahead in the marriage of litigators and computers, now that lawyers want technology that respects their intellect and do not just want to flaunt a trophy PC?
Twenty years ago, technology advocates, myself included, told every lawyer who would listen that litigation technology could even the playing field for smaller law practices. Any lawyer would be able to take on cases of massive scale by harnessing digital technology to cope with legions of facts that only the largest firms could handle before the advent of the personal computer. Implicit in those promises was the empowerment of individual lawyers to try complex cases without a coterie of associates, paralegals and contract employees. Trial technology would make it possible to try a difficult case as long as a lawyer had the will, even if he did not have the wallet.
What has become of that idealism almost 10 years into the new millennium? While there certainly are more complex criminal and civil trials today, featuring millions of documents sprung from computers and countless file storage boxes, has technology delivered on its promise to democratize trial law, as it has democratized video and print publishing, the Web and Internet commerce? Can the average lawyer with an average budget master a big case with the aid of technology? The answer is clearly "no," or at least "not yet."
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Source: law.com
By: Sam Guiberson
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