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Lawyers Must Learn to Search

By Bruce Carton

For as long as there has been civil discovery in lawsuits, litigators have had responsibility for the task of figuring out how to search for the documents responsive to an adversary's requests. As the amount of information available to companies and people explodes, however, that task has become more challenging. Last week, Steven C. Bennett, a partner with Jones Day who also teaches electronic discovery at Rutgers and New York Law School, wrote on tech news site Internet Revolution that despite numerous advances in conceptual and artificial intelligence methods for search, the legal community has to a large extent ignored these developments. Bennett offers several reasons for this disconnect. Among other things he reminds us that, historically, discovery in litigation was conducted exclusively on paper, with documents reviewed by hand for relevance. He also notes that "the only search mechanisms generally taught in law school concern closed sets of materials, i.e., judicial opinions and other materials gathered by large publishing companies such as Westlaw or LexisNexis." Bennett argues that those days may be gone, however, as courts have now suggested that expert assistance is required to formulate reasonable searches for purposes of discovery in litigation. Indeed, he cites U.S. District...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on September 22, 2009 (boomark / email).