By Robert Alan Eisenberg
Speaking with professional litigation support practitioners who have come to specialize in the highly complex and technically challenging discipline of e-Discovery, it is very revealing when inquiring where precisely they have developed the skill set to successfully grapple with the discovery of electronically stored information, or ESI. As those in the field of litigation support can anticipate, the responses are almost as numerous as the people questioned. It is a very, very small minority of those queried who say that they have received any in-depth, formal technical training on the subject before working in the field. More likely, the knowledge was acquired via on-the-job, in-the-trenches training and from veterans already on the front lines who have deigned to take a neophyte under their wing.
There is nothing wrong with acquiring expertise from a more senior mentor or someone who has already established a knowledge base in the discipline. However, such medieval guild-like instructional guidance — seasoned individuals passing to acolytes skills developed after long, difficult, often chaotic experiences, under the “Sword of Damocles” of evidence spoliation and career ruination — is not the path to finally confronting the educational challenge of what was once considered a minor subcategory of litigation support and is now, arguably, the most technologically advanced. One that is fraught with potential liability and, very frequently, is the most costly aspect of modern litigation practice.
A well-structured, professionally staffed training program that constitutes a formal academy where all those who would develop the necessary expertise and professional confidence will find standardized comprehensive training, provided by a faculty of universally recognized experts, is needed.
That level of highly professional instruction will be provided by an e-Discovery training academy being prepared for launch within the next six to eight months at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.
In the realm of legal education, the Georgetown University Law Center is an established, visionary leader in enabling lifelong legal education. Indeed, the Continuing Legal Education Program of the Law Center has created wonderful vehicles for the comprehensive continued study of complex disciplines in the practice of law through its widely admired series of CLE Institutes. One of the most successful of such vehicles is the Law Center’s Advanced E-Discovery Institute, under whose auspices the academy is being established.
It seems a natural process that this distinguished venue for the most admired programs of continuing education in the law will also be the home of the nation’s — and, indeed, the world’s — first formal, law-school affiliated, school for instruction in the discovery of ESI: the E-Discovery Training Academy.
It is anticipated that the course of study offered by the academy will include modules in e-Discovery technical theory and “hands on” procedures, as well as those exploring the substantive and procedural law of the discovery of ESI. It’s estimated that most of the academy’s student body will be composed of practice support professionals, skilled technologists (such as IT and systems specialists) and attorneys.
Among those involved with crafting the program are some of the most well recognized and universally respected in the field, including distinguished members of the federal judiciary (past and present), representatives of more than half of the top 20 law firms in the United States (based on the most recent National Law Journal survey), authors of universally acknowledged authoritative works on the discovery of ESI, several law school adjunct professors of e-Discovery and undergraduate instructors on various aspects of the subject, the managing editor of the premier newsletter in the field of e-Discovery, members of the advisory board and columnists for one of the premier publications on legal technology, the editor-in-chief of the Sedona Paper on the use of search and information retrieval methods in e-Discovery, members of the advisory board and tech savvy and highly talented current and past faculty of the Georgetown University Law Center’s Advanced E-Discovery Institute, and the keynote speakers for the Legal Tech Conference in New York City for the last two years.
Moreover, there is another reason why the Georgetown University Law Center is the natural mid-wife for such an academy. The Law Center is the most cosmopolitan of focal points for progressive thinking and leadership in the field of e-Discovery. Because the Law Center is an educational institution, it draws jurists; because it is considered one of the finest schools for the training of future trial lawyers, it draws litigators; because it is, in general, one of the most highly regarded of law schools, it draws educators; and because it has been the most innovative and aggressive in promoting continuing legal education, it has founded one of the best attended and prestigious of CLE programs in the universe of such instructional forums, The Advanced E-Discovery Institute. The broad demographic that constitutes the academy’s supporters serves as poignant testimony to this unusually high degree of cosmopolitanism and sophistication.
It is envisioned, that, in functioning as the premier training school for those engaging in e-Discovery, the academy will:
- Establish baselines for excellence in providing ESI discovery services
- Function as a vehicle for the development of standards, procedures and best practices in the discovery of ESI
- Function as a prolific platform for the benchmarking of advanced e-Discovery technology
- Aid extensively in the creation of a common vocabulary and nomenclature for the discipline of e-Discovery
- Provide a forum for both judicial and government authorities to offer and seek guidance in matters relating to the discovery of ESI
- Provide a corps of professionally trained and motivated e-Discovery specialists with significant skills in the area of proactive preservation and defensible retention of ESI leading to a reduction in the troublingly steady and largely disorganized growth of electronic data
In March, a forum of some of the best and brightest practice support individuals was held at Georgetown Law Center, composed of litigation support management and senior level e-Discovery specialists. This esteemed group provided a wealth of comments and innovative thinking concerning the proposed syllabus for the academy. The members of the Academy Sub-Committee of the Advanced E-Discovery Institute, came away extraordinarily impressed with the interest and passion of attendees, who traveled from all regions of the country to attend, and the wonderful ideas for developing the curriculum and promoting the academy program that emanated from the group.
The E-Discovery Training Academy is scheduled to launch its prototype program in the winter of 2009 and anticipates that the reception for the school and the attendance will be excellent. The completion of the first full complement of courses offered by the academy and the graduation of its inaugural class will be, in years to come, recognized in the history of litigation practice as the time and place at which the discipline of e-Discovery came of age.
Robert Alan Eisenberg is vice-president of e-Discovery consulting at Capital Legal Solutions in Falls Church, Va. He practiced law for more than 14 years in New York State as in-house corporate counsel and a private practitioner, and has been engaged in the litigation support area for almost 20 years. In the last 10 years, he has devoted his professional career to the discipline of the discovery of ESI, in the educational realm and as a consultant and provider of technical services. Eisenberg is an original member of the Sedona Working Group on Electronic Document Production and Retention and a founder and permanent co-chair of the Advanced E-Discovery Institute of Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C.
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