I am fortunate to teach electronic discovery and digital evidence in many venues. There’s the semester-long, 3 credit course at the University of Texas School of Law each Fall, the weeklong Training Academy offered to all comers each June at Georgetown Law School (as part of a splendid faculty) and the 50-70 speeches a year that keep me idling at airports. Next month, I’m adding a sixteen week, eight-session online evening program through the District of  Columbia Bar, immodestly titled “Prime Time with Craig Ball.”

All of these entail accompanying written material, so there is a lot of research and writing for the various courses and presentations.  Some of my students aren’t lawyers or are law students with the barest theoretical understanding of discovery.  I’ve found it’s never safe to assume that students know the mechanisms of last-century civil discovery, let alone those of modern e-discovery.  Accordingly, I penned the following short introduction to discovery in U.S. civil litigation and offer it here in case you need something like it, especially if you’re also teaching this stuff.  [It’s copyrighted, but feel free to use it with attribution].

Though I have never known a time without discovery, I found it interesting to reflect on the fact that civil discovery is only about 20 years older than I am; Discovery is nearly a Baby Boomer!  On a scale of jurisprudential evolution, we’re both young punks.  Need some perspective?  The FRCP are exactly the same age as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, former Attorney General Janet Reno and Prof. Alan Dershowitz.  Continue reading →

It’s said that the difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.  True enough. A benefit of adulthood is that, if you’re lucky, you can splurge on stuff you dreamed of as a child.  For me, a boyish passion was remote sensing and control.  When you’re small and powerless, you feel bigger and empowered to monitor and control things from afar, even if “afar” is just a few feet away. So, before I began fooling with phones and multi frequency switching systems as an adolescent, I was a grade schooler stringing, first real string, then wires and finally transmitters and receivers to turn things on and off and monitor my little world.

Most of these I built, some I bought (or, more accurately, I received as gifts from my indulgent parents).  I vividly remember the Sonuswitch from the venerable  Hammacher Schlemmer‎ store on East 57th Street in Manhattan, a boxy black and gold brick that turned on lights with two hand claps or by jingling keys.

The ’60s were a Golden Age for the electronics tinkerer.  Radio Shack then sold aisle-after-aisle of bright red Science Fair electronics kits and thousands of discrete components (what transistors, resistors, and capacitors are called to distinguish them from integrated circuits or “chips”).  In 1967, I’d venture down to Canal Street and cruise blocks of surplus electronic outlets selling “space age” government surplus componentry or drool over the wares at the long gone Lafayette Radio Electronics and Heathkit stores on West 45th Street.  Lafayette is where I got an FM transmitter that allowed me to broadcast to a vacant corner of the FM dial and the Big Ear, a giant orange parabolic microphone that promised the ability to listen to distant whispered conversations.

I’ve tread memory lane with a purpose: to talk about the latest manifestation of my childhood longings for remote monitoring and control and what they signal with respect to e-discovery.  Today, we are entering a Golden Age of remote sensing and control for the masses.  Internet-enabled cameras monitor my home, and lights and door locks answer to apps on my iPhone.  My lightbulbs talk to the network and adjust brightness and hue on command.  My thermostat let’s me tweak energy usage from aloft when I’ve forgotten to do it before heading to the airport.

And the most exciting development in my nerd’s paradise is the ability to control much of it by speaking to the new woman in my life, Alexa, the e-persona of my Amazon Echo and Dot devices.

I have my buddy Ernie the Attorney Svenson to thank for introducing me to Alexa.  In Ernie’s lovely Uptown New Orleans home, Alexa’s sleek, black cylinder holds a prominent place in the living room.  From the first moment Alexa and I spoke, I  knew I had to have her. And have her, I did.  I’ve had her in my bedroom, my bathroom, kitchen and living room, in my places in Austin and New Orleans.  Oh, Alexa, is there anything you won’t do for me? Continue reading →

Five years ago, I wrote The Luddite Litigator’s Guide to Databases in E-Discovery to accompany a lecture on the subject at the 2010 Georgetown Advanced E-Discovery Institute.  When I went looking for source material for the article, I was struck by how little there was.  Databases hold most of what we seek in discovery; yet, no one had written anything practical about discovering structured data.  My Luddite Litigator’s Guide was a start, but far from a comprehensive treatment as it lacked the takeaway lawyers crave most: exemplar language and forms.

The curse of legal writing is that we are less prone to create than emulate.  We borrow language from forms as though it were enchanted incantations.  In fact, there are precious few magic words that must appear in pleadings and discovery requests, a point made often and expertly by Bryan Garner, whose thoughtful work I commend to you as a path to better legal writing.

I loathe the practice of law from forms, but I bow to its power.  If we hope to get lawyers to use more efficient and precise prose in their discovery requests, we can’t just harangue them to do it; we’ve “got to put the hay down where the goats can get it.” To that end, here is some language to consider when seeking information about databases and when serving notice of the deposition of  corporate designees (e.g., per Rule 30(b)(6) in Federal civil practice): Continue reading →

I’m sitting outside a courtroom in Texas where I have left the proceedings rather than risk the assertion that I learned confidential information offered as testimony in open court.  Sounds crazy, I know; but when lawyers agree to protective orders and judges enter them (then order that they apply to anyone sitting in the courtroom, signatory or not), judges and lawyers tend not to consider what impact those orders have on persons not parties to the case.  Just as there must be a right to protect truly privileged information and trade secrets, there must be a corollary right not to take on the burden and risk of protecting such information when you neither seek nor require disclosure of confidential data.  We have a right not to know.

Continue reading →