Extract from Cat Casey’s article “eDiscovery in the Brave New Digital World”
Tech evolution isn’t creeping forward. It’s tearing through the fabric of how we live, work, and play. Over 150,000 new mobile apps are launched every month. TikTok hit a billion users in under half the time it took Facebook, and entire new ecosystems of digital communication are forming before most legal teams can figure out how to log in. This isn’t a wave. It’s a flood. And it’s bringing a whole new breed of electronically stored information (ESI) into the discovery crosshairs.
Whether it’s short-form video platforms, self-destructing messages, or the chat threads your client swears they “never used for anything formal,” these new data sources aren’t just noise. They’re discoverable. They’re evidence. And they’re forcing the legal world to reckon with a reality it’s been trying to sidestep for way too long.
New Data Delicacies
The Legal industry is no stranger to emerging types of electronic data, it seems like just a hot minute ago that the Federal rule of civil procedure had to pivot to encompass ESI within discovery requests, spawning eDiscovery in the first place. But the sheer volume of new data sources facing legal teams today is staggering. Legal technology is helping to bridge the gap, but the practice of law is truly in some uncharted territory.
Many of the new kids on the ESI block were squarely in the personal use domain, but the pandemic and mass shift to a virtualized workforce accelerated adoption of many new applications in a business context. In the last few years there was a mass adoption of ephemeral messaging apps like WhatsApp to facilitate communications in global teams.
