Couple of Areas For Attorney Tech Education

I’ve seen a number of big names in the E-Discovery industry emphasizing the need for some basic technology education as part of the law school curriculum, especially as it relates to e-Discovery.

In the last couple of days, I’ve also seen a couple of articles that highlight a couple of areas where just a little bit of knowledge can help out in regards to an attorney managing e-discovery.

The first was a great overview of how virtualization can impact the process of locating relevant data. The attorney managing e-discovery doesn’t need to be an expert in hardware virtualization tools, but needs to be aware enough to find out if it’s being used, and realize that sitting down at a PC and doing a keyword search for documents isn’t going to locate anything that might be stored in the VM. Jason Briody does a good job giving enough information so that any attorney can be a bit better educated, without getting into too much of the nitty gritty tech stuff.

The second is a post by Craig Ball about the impact of 1TB and larger hard drives being out in the wild now. Simply put, when it comes to forensic imaging, it means more time, and more cost due to the shear size of the drives. This is a concept that I find many non-techies, not just attorneys, have difficulty grasping. Larger drives take longer to image, just as larger files take longer to copy, and larger data sets take longer to process, etc. It’s important to understand the size of what we’re dealing with before you agree to deadlines or make promises to clients about the time/cost involved.

It might seem pretty simply to the tech folks reading, but these are important details that often get overlooked when dealing with e-discovery. Having an attorney who is educated on these somewhat simple items can make a big difference!

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