So for anyone out there who feared that this blog had died, rest assured that it is not completely dead, merely dormant for quite some time. But we hope to bring new life to the blog with the help and assistance of Hinna Upal who is in Pierce Atwood's Providence, Rhode Island office.
To try to get things rolling again, I thought I would provide a link to an interesting article that ran in the New York Times last month, in case you missed it. The article explores the growing sophistication of e-discovery software and the potential to (gasp) replace a lot of the work normally performed by lawyers in churning through hours spent reviewing thousands of pages of documents before they are produced in litigation. Others have written follow-up articles, and there has been extensive discussion about the real impact of evolving technology in the e-discovery world since the New York Times article was published. Some say the changes won't really result in the downfall of the human side of the legal profession, but instead bring about the kind of retooling and refocusing of lawyers that happens over time anyway. See, for instance, Ralph Losey's blog.
Time will tell how comfortable clients really are with relying more and more heavily on technology to fulfill their discovery obligations under the rules. As with many other areas, courts often are more forgiving of human error or oversight than they are with attempts to blame technology when something goes wrong.
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