eDiscovery Matters to Your Litigation Career

eDiscovery Matters

Think about the family law paralegal working on a divorce case.

Did the soon-to-be ex-husband ask Alexa to Google how to hide assets from someone? Did he use Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger to communicate with his girlfriend? Does he have special software installed on his computer to prevent his wife from seeing what he’s really doing online? 

You won’t ever know if you don’t do eDiscovery. As the litigation paralegal working on that case, you can’t do your job effectively without knowing how to handle eDiscovery.

What if you’re a personal injury paralegal?

Maybe you don’t think eDiscovery matters to your paralegal career because you receive those medical records and other documents (most likely electronically as a PDF now instead of paper). But what about when the case goes to trial? Are there things that will be used at trial that came in electronically, like emails, text messages, and audio messages to 911.

Or maybe most of your cases settle, this may apply to you when you consider if there are technologies out there that could increase your efficiency when it comes to reviewing and organizing medical records. Are you still printing out those PDFs, highlighting, and putting them into notebooks?

It doesn’t matter what practice area you are in. Just replace the word eDiscovery with practice-specific technology.

There’s a quote from Stewart Brand that I like and applies in this case, “Once a new technology rolls over you if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”

Here is a 3-step plan for litigation paralegals to accelerate their careers.

Your Future with eDiscovery

eDiscovery is not going away. It’s only going to become more critical for you to know. In fact, I remember the day not too long ago when eDiscovery skills were listed in a job advertisement in the “preferred skills” section of the job description. Now, it’s almost always in the required skills section. And that’s why I am constantly talking about career security over job security.

You might currently be at a job at a small law firm with only a couple of lawyers and they’re older. They like things printed and reviewed on paper. So you don’t have to know much about eDiscovery for your job. 

For your current job.

But what happens if those attorneys close the firm, downsize, or get bought out by a bigger firm? Now, in order to find another job as a litigation paralegal, you’ll be required to have eDiscovery skills.

Think about eDiscovery just like you would think about any other skill you need to have as a litigation paralegal.

Because no one writes letters on paper anymore. Well, on a special occasion we might, but that’s not happening like it used to back when I was growing up. 

When was the last time you signed a contract on paper and put a copy in a file cabinet drawer?

Are there some businesses that still keep huge file storage rooms and go there to retrieve a copy of something? Sure, maybe there are some. But not very many.

Even the hold-out law firms who were still all paper in 2019 have gone electronic thanks to Covid.

Remember a decade or two ago when you would print out directions to go somewhere?

Or when you had to bring your camera to the drugstore to get your pictures developed and wait a few days to go back and pick them up?

How about when you used to have to write a check, put a stamp on it, and mail it to pay your power bill?

In fact, that’s a really good analogy. If you were to do that now and added up the cost of an envelope, a stamp, and the cost of getting those checkbook refills, it might cost you 75 cents to send that check by mail, but it’s free to pay that bill online or in the power company’s app! And multiply that by thousands of payments.

That’s what it’s like when you’re printing out all of those emails instead of utilizing eDiscovery technology. It doesn’t seem like much at first but totaled up throughout the case, or throughout the year, it’s a lot more than you think.

Learn about a path to eDiscovery certification.

How Things Have Changed for Paralegals

If you’re still only dipping your toes into eDiscovery and hoping it just goes away, or that maybe you’ll be able to retire before you have to learn it…you’re not alone. I hear that from someone at least once a month. They email me or call me and ask me about the eDiscovery Boot Camp and they tell me, they kept hoping it was going away, or that their attorney would stick with the paper method long enough for them to get closer to retirement. 

I get it. I was part of the good ole days when document production from the other side arrived in piles of boxes or trucks full of boxes. I had to sift through all of that paper, armed with my stack of colored flags and post-it notes and my dictaphone, giving a summary of what was in each box. That little cassette tape would go to the word processing department or the secretary so it could become a production index. 

If you’re a paralegal younger than 35, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. But the others, you’re probably out there shaking your head because you remember those days.

If it was a review of our client’s documents that we were going to have to produce to the other side, I’d be using my red flags for the privilege, yellow for confidential information, green for responsive, blue for XYZ, and the list goes on.

It was time-consuming! But I have to admit it was rewarding when I’d look into a room full of boxes and see that sea of red, yellow, and green flags. But that was 20 years ago.

At that time we were just starting to dabble in eDiscovery. Usually only when it was a bet the company type of case, because eDiscovery was not as prevalent back then. It was also not as user-friendly and accessible as it is now.

Embrace eDiscovery for More Opportunity

I can go through a whole list of reasons why you should embrace eDiscovery if you are a litigation paralegal, AND how it can actually make your job easier, not more complicated. That’s what I’m going to show you in our FREE masterclass.

If you want to fast-track your litigation career, join me for that because if you have not yet mastered eDiscovery, I will show you why it’s so critical for your career that you do it now.

I recently interviewed a former litigation paralegal who mastered eDiscovery and she is the perfect example of how to use eDiscovery skills to seriously accelerate your career. She’s one of many litigation paralegals, where you see what they’ve done with their careers, and get insight into just how much is possible. Even if that’s not exactly what you want for yourself, just to know that there are so many possibilities that open up.