Extract from Stephanie Wilkins’s article “Is Attorney E-Discovery Incompetence the Elephant in the Room?”
First there was the cell phone snafu in the Alex Jones case. Then there was the Dropbox debacle from the Jan. 6 committee. Shortly after that, the Jan. 6 committee again indadvertently disclosed politicians’ Social Security numbers.
The past year has been a big one for very public e-discovery failures. While they may have been novelties for general headline news, these mistakes are nothing new to those who have been working in the e-discovery industry for any significant amount of time. But is attorney e-discovery incompetence looming to the point of being the industry’s elephant in the room?
“In short, yes, it’s always there,” said Kelly Twigger, principal at ESI Attorneys.
If lack of e-discovery competence is such a known issue, though, why aren’t people talking about it more, and loudly?
How Pervasive Is the Problem?
Last month, eDiscovery Today’s ”2023 State of the Industry Report,” based on survey responses from more than 400 e-discovery industry leaders, identified a lack of e-discovery competence within legal as the biggest e-discovery challenge not being talked about enough—for the third year in a row.
Out of ten possible choices of e-discovery challenges that are not being addressed enough, nearly a quarter of respondents overall (23.4%) chose Lack of eDiscovery Competence as number one. While this was down 6.6% from the previous year, it was still significantly ahead of the second-choice challenge, In-Place Indexing and the Move to the Left of the EDRM Model, which came in at a distant 15.4%.
