Extract from Judge Scott Schlegel’s article “Beyond Banker’s Boxes: My Key Take-Aways from Day One of an E-Discovery Conference”
Anyone who practiced law before the digital era recalls conference rooms filled with towering stacks of banker’s boxes, teams of exhausted associates poring over reams of paper late into the night, and sticky notes attached to countless documents. Discovery was once a labor-intensive, physical process demanding both human endurance and legal insight. I remember the good old days when a brief discovery conference was all it took—parties would simply agree on a handful of search terms, and that was enough to launch the process. Those simpler times, while straightforward, have given way to a reality where such an approach no longer suffices.
Today, banker’s boxes have been replaced by terabytes of data. Modern discovery now encompasses not only paper documents but also emails, text messages, Teams/Slack logs, linked files, social media posts, metadata, and a vast array of electronically stored information. In many ways, a single smartphone can hold more data than entire law firms once stored in filing cabinets. The exponential growth in data types and volumes—and the inherent complexity of digital communications—renders a few predetermined keywords insufficient to capture all relevant evidence.
The legal profession’s initial step toward modernization came with the advent of Technology-Assisted Review (TAR) and predictive coding.
