to streamline discovery, rather than use it as an opportunity to antagonize, Nahrstadt said. The courts have weighed in on proportionality and cooperation in what Nahrstadt called a "game changer," especially for smaller law firms and their clients. Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which are expected to go to Congress by May 2015 and be effective as new law as of December 1, 2015, promote proportionality in e-discovery. One amendment revises the scope of discovery, stating discovery must be "proportional to the needs of the case considering the amount in controversy, the importance of the issues at stake in the action, the parties' resources, the importance of the discovery in resolving the issues, and whether the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its benefit." Courts are also calling upon parties and their counsel to cooperate on e-discovery issues. In July 2008, the Sedona Conference, an e-discovery think-tank, started the movement by publishing its "Cooperation Proclamation." Since then, some judges and courts have endorsed the proclamation and stressed the importance of cooperation in the e-discovery process. This directly benefits Primerus firms and their clients, Nahrstadt said. "I think that we, as smaller firms, as a general rule are more collaborative than the bigger firms. We have better relationships with the attorneys that we face simply because we actually do the work. We are actually doing the work rather than a first year associate, who goes to a third year associate, who goes to a junior partner, who goes to a senior partner," he said. "We're not built with that kind of bureaucracy. We tend to be the people on the front lines dealing with the other side, so we need to have civil of us in small firms have been pushing proportionality before the rules changed." Another e-discovery trend predictive coding also levels the playing field among small and bigger firms. Predictive coding is technology that uses keyword searches, filtering and sampling to automate portions of an e-discovery document review, all with the goal of reducing the number of documents that need to be reviewed manually. Nahrstadt likened it to the same technology Netflix uses to pick movies users would like, as well as grocery stores to print coupons based on a customer's purchases. "I think that people are starting to realize the gold standard is no longer a lawyer looking at every piece of paper," Nahrstadt said. He cited a 2012 RAND study which showed that document review makes up 73 percent of discovery costs, representing an exorbitant cost to clients. "This has the potential to be a real game-changer when we're talking about cost," Nahrstadt said. "This is not only good for us, it's good for our clients." of the Oklahoma Bar Association Management Assistance Program, lawyers today must embrace technology that helps them and their clients. In his article "It's Time to Love Technology" in the January/February 2015 issue of Law Practice, he points out that in 2012, the American Bar Association Rules of Professional Conduct were amended to state that lawyers must have knowledge of "the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology." "The long history of our profession is dealing with a lot of information with paper," Calloway said. "We were experts on paper client files and 3-by-5 index cards and all sorts of methods that allowed us to manage client information very effectively. Now that the world has changed and paper is almost always not the most efficient way to handle undertaking a shift in the way they operate." In his article, Calloway tells the story of Casey Flaherty, Kia America's in-house counsel, who was very pleased with their outside counsel's legal work, but not so pleased with their efficiency in administrative matters. He worked with professor Andrew Perlman of the Suffolk University Law School's Institute on Law Practice Technology Information and Innovation to create the Legal Tech Audit, released in August 2014. "Examples of poor uses of technology that cost the client money included printing documents to paper and then scanning them to create a PDF file rather than creating the PDF directly on the computer, and an associate billing for hours to manually make mathematical calculations that could be done with a spreadsheet." Calloway said Flaherty and others decided this was a major differentiator in law firms. As he wrote in his article, technologies that allow them to accomplish things that would not have been possible a short time ago," ... "It allows them to offer better services at less cost, as well as collaborate more closely with their fellow Primerus members around the world." |