Extract from Cat Casey’s article “Into the eDiscovery Metaverse”
For most Electronic Discovery and legal professionals, the term “meta” recalls document review and pesky data about data that increasingly can make or break a case. But Facebook’s massive rebrand as Meta may be the harbinger of something more impactful to the practice of law and eDiscovery than even the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. For Facebook, this rebrand was all about the emerging concept known as the Metaverse. It has signaled the behemoth’s intention to take the lead in developing and embracing it.
Before you laugh and shake off the entire concept of the Metaverse as unlikely to stick or something only the most avid gamer should care about, recall that people said much the same about the internet only a few decades ago. Even Newsweek got in on the action, with a now much-ridiculed article Why the Internet won’t be Nirvana. The article famously opined that “no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.” and was so incredibly far off the mark that Newsweek sheepishly revisited the piece only 15 years later in an article that opened: ” What’s the most wrong you’ve ever been?”
While I cannot predict the future impact of the Metaverse, on social media, healthcare, or the practice of law. It may still make sense for legal professionals to take note of what exactly this internet 2.0 might look like and what the social, business, and legal ramifications of this brave new virtual world might mean for their practices.
