If you can tear yourselves away for a moment from the grim headlines in the newspapers of tumbling stock markets and idiots rioting in the streets, you will know that I believe one of the major barriers to engaging lawyers in the use of appropriate technology is the widespread use of “technospeak.”
It seems obvious to me that if you are going to try and engage anyone in a process which is unfamiliar to them you need at the outset to set their minds at rest and you will not succeed in doing that if you use language with which they cannot identify. At best their eyes glaze over and at worst they run a mile. What makes it worse in the world of e-disclosure/discovery is that they cannot run far because considering whether to use technology is now firmly centre stage in the litigation process. While they may not be able to run far, they will almost certainly not run back to you if you get it wrong to begin with and they will end up with one of the many other organisations who profess to offer similar services. Last time I put the term “e-disclosure” into Google I came up with 95 million hits, so how on earth does a lawyer or anyone else looking for help decide which one to go for?
