Curriculum Guide · Courses

Professors Peter Gronvall and Michael Hitsky

J.D. Seminar 067 | 2 credit hours

In today’s age of exploding data volumes, called into focus by increasingly strenuous discovery obligations in federal and state legal matters, lawyers face the critical need to embrace and understand the legal and technical aspects of legal discovery, to achieve both compliance and litigation advantage for their clients. This course examines the ways in which data and technology are fundamentally transforming the practice of law. We will examine new rules of procedure and case law that confront these issues. We will examine closely some of the core technology that is deployed in the creation, storage and manipulation of electronic records. This course will be a hands-on practicum: through a series of lectures and demonstrations and with valuable insights from industry experts, students will examine the fascinating interplay of technology and law, with particular focus on how case outcomes are shaped by the electronic discovery process itself – often before the merits of a case are ever visited. Other topics will include preservation, analytics and review of data, development of a discovery plan and budget, third party roles in e-discovery, and the emerging roles of discovery experts. Perhaps most importantly, this course will familiarize students with many of the ways technology is used in modern-day litigation at the discovery stage. The course is designed for those students who are seriously thinking about focusing their professional career on litigation practice.

Prerequisite: None. Recommended: Evidence; Civil Procedure (or the equivalent Legal Process and Society); Trial Practice.

Students may not receive credit for both this seminar and Introduction to Electronic Discovery and Evidence.