New column on Slaw

In case you haven't seen it yet, I have a new column out on Slaw.ca, the Canadian legal/tech collaborative blog website.

In this column I highlight something that is concerning a number of people in the eDiscovery world: the need for basic research to determine just how effective our eDiscovery tools and methodologies are.

Why is this important?

Well, I think in all the excitement (for us geeks, anyway) over how cool the technology is, it's easy to forget that the end point of all this whiz-bang technology is to find the relevant evidence and get it admitted in court. For something to be admissible you need (to a greater or lesser extent) to be able to demonstrate that the evidence is what it purports to be.

Without some basic research, there is a danger that we will all just assume that Tool X or Process Y does what we think it does because no-one has ever really checked to see if it really does do that or not.

The TREC Legal Track project is a good example of the kind of much-needed research that should be performed. I hope to see much more like it.