It’s eDiscovery Case Law Day! Today at 1pm, we’ll be conducting our EDRM November case law webinar, with Tom O’Connor, Mary Mack and Hon. Andrew Peck (Ret.). You might think that, in the year of the pandemic, we have less eDiscovery case law rulings to choose from. In fact, we have more than ever, according to the definitive source for eDiscovery case law – eDiscovery Assistant.
Recently, eDiscovery Assistant (eDA) announced it now has over 14,000 lifetime case decisions on their site. 14,000! They also ask “how many have you read?”. Hahaha! Are you kidding? I’ve been using eDA as my sole source for eDiscovery case law for the past few years and I typically cover about 60-70 case law opinions per year. To cover that many, I have to read (or at least skim – I’m only human!) about three to four case law opinions for every one that I select. So, I probably read/skimmed about 180-280 cases a year, which is probably more than most people. Yet, needless to say, I’m a long way from having read a significant percentage of them on the site. Happy now, eDA?!? ;o)
As for 2020, eDA has published 2,098 decisions so far (actually, more like 2,143, since the total as of last night was now 14,082). In their blog post announcing the 14,000th decision, eDA lists the top three issues consistently week after week (so far, sanctions tops proportionality – but not by much!). So, how does 2,100+ cases compare to previous years? According to eDiscovery Assistant CEO Kelly Twigger: “We have seen a record breaking number of eDiscovery decisions this year with more than 2,100 new case decisions published from federal, state, administrative, and tribal courts bringing our case law library to over 14,000.” Record breaking number? The pandemic has certainly not affected the number of eDiscovery case law decisions this year.
Speaking of eDA, they also rolled out a new more updated user interface last month. The look and feel of the platform is much more modern, navigation is easier, even the logo is updated! Here is an example of the old interface dashboard vs. the new dashboard:
The improvements include:
- Better utilization of screen real estate to improve readability and use of features
- New dashboard display of case law metrics including new decisions, total decisions in the database and most cited issues
- Search navigation improved to allow users to move through results faster
- Case Law search updated for users to start with issues and leverage our content team’s work tagging all cases
- Separate search filters for Issues, Jurisdiction, Judge and Date to allow for easy search creation and modification
- Added boolean searching
- Simplified look and feel consistent with other web-based platforms
- Added in-application chat feature to allow users to reach out to our team for searching or content questions
So, all of the features that I wrote about back in May are still there, with even more – and they’re more intuitive and easier to use than ever! According to Kelly, “Knowing that the volume of decisions we are seeing from courts will continue to grow (with over 40 new cases added this week alone) it was important for us to launch a new user interface to provide our clients and partners, like eDiscovery Assistant, a faster, easier and more powerful way to search with a few clicks.”
Having used the new interface for a few weeks now, I’m quite impressed – it’s very intuitive, with a clean fresh look, and navigating through the site is much simpler! And I should know – after all, I have to keep looking for those 60-70 cases I write about (out of thousands) each year!
If you’re not a current user of eDA, you can still sign up for a FREE 30 day trial here.
So, what do you think? Have you checked out the new UI for eDiscovery Assistant? If not, now you can, for FREE! And please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.