Craig Ball’s latest post revisits a post from a few years ago, but his revisiting of girding for the e-savvy opponent is just as relevant today.

In his latest post on his excellent Ball in your Court blog (Girding for the E-Savvy Opponent (Revisited), available here), Craig revisits a post he wrote back in 2015 when he was in London for a conference (I covered it on my old blog back then). As Craig states (tying in his attendance for some of the events of the 70th anniversary of VE Day):

“It’s said that, ‘Generals are always prepared to fight the last war.’ This speaks as much to technology as to tactics.  Mounted cavalry proved no match for armored tanks.  Machine guns made trench warfare obsolete.  The Maginot Line became a punch line thanks to the Blitzkrieg. ‘Heavy fortifications?  “No problem, mein schatzi, ve vill just drive arount tem.’”

What does that mean to eDiscovery (or eDisclosure, as it’s called “across the pond”)?

“In e-disclosure, we still fight the last war, smug in the belief that our opponents will never be e-savvy enough to defeat us.”

He also says this:

“Tech-challenged opponents make it easy. They don’t appreciate how our arsenal of information has changed; so, they shoot at us with obsolete requests from the last war, the paper war. They don’t grasp that the information they need now lives in databases and won’t be found by keywords. They demand documents. We have data. They demand files.  We have sources… But, our once tech challenged opponents will someday evolve into Juris Doctor Electronicus.”

Craig also provides a simple bullet-point list of ten things that e-savvy opponents will do. Here are two of them:

• Demand competent search
• Insist on native production

In the era of potential deepfake evidence, that second point is more relevant than ever.

Want to see what the other eight points are to help in girding for the e-savvy opponent? Click here to read his post.

So, what do you think? Are you fighting the last war on eDiscovery? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “two robots engaged in a medieval battle”.

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