Comments on: Harsh Reality From the Socha-Gelbmann Survey

By: Mike McBride

Mike McBride — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:22:00 +0000

Thanks for the comments Christine and Craig. I will, however, question one small aspect of your comment Craig, and knowing what you do, I assume this is not what you meant. I do think it's entirely appropriate to "hire someone" for certain technical tasks. Forensics is certainly a good example of that, as someone with an IT background, but not certified in any forensics field, I'd be the first person to suggest we hire someone to do forensic collection. Certainly an attorney should hire someone to do EDD processing, or production sets, etc. whether that be in-house or an outside vendor. So I'm not convinced any litigation attorney needs to know the exact details of how to do these things. On the other hand, all of this "legal" work can only be done by the rest of us under the supervision of an attorney, and I'm not sure how much supervision there could be if they don't know the first thing about what's happening in the "black box", so to speak. And I don't know how fair to clients it is to hold yourself out to be "expert" when in reality it's the people you hired are the experts. "Pay not attention to the "man behind the curtain", if you will.

It might be more efficient to let the man behind the curtain out to talk to the clients directly, instead of worrying about the lawyer's cloak of expertise.

By: Craig Ball

Craig Ball — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:29:11 +0000

Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! You nailed it in pointing out that knowledge of some leading cases, the Federal Rules and maybe even some experience with a CLE and a TIFF production do not an expert make. Yet, many of those 200 "experts" and e-discovery "practice chairs" argue that the don't need to know the technology because they can hire someone to handle that. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

I can't tell you how many lawyer experts haven't the slightest idea where to look on a PC to locate a user's local e-mail stores! What they don't understand they dismiss as unimportant or characterize as someone else's concern.

If there's anything I've learned about EDD, it's that you have to know many ways to skin the cat. Too many folks learned one way, and just keep trying to cram everything through that hole. As they say, "if all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail."

By: Christine Taylor

Christine Taylor — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:43:58 +0000

Mike, you couldn't be more right. I'm an eDiscovery analyst who came out of IT, and I am constantly astonished at the inability of the Legal community to closely involve IT. This is particularly the case at the corporate level where identification, collection and preservation happen. Or DON'T happen depending on how well corporate Legal works with IT. (Which usually is pretty bad.)

Great post from the IT perspective, and makes me realize that I am not alone in banging my head against the wall.

By: Mike McBride

Mike McBride — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:03:57 +0000

No, there are lots of lawyers who don't do litigation, thus support work for their practice would not be litigation support. Litigation Support is a specialized area of work.

By: Litigation support

Litigation support — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:52:28 +0000

Any professional support of non-lawyers to the lawyers on any legal issues is litigation support..am i rite admin