Legal Technology
An array of legal technology consulting firms around the country offer legal technology services in the form of trial presentation services, helping and enabling law firms to present their viewpoint to juries and judges through the most effective and convincing format. With the increasing reliance on technological and digitally driven functions through contemporary society as a while, the field of legal technology is felt by observers and advocates of this sector of the economy to be a promising area for continued future development and for the offering of employment opportunities to individuals who exhibit proficiency and ingenuity in their ability to offer legal technology services. One important aspect of the overall trade of offering information in courts of law for consideration as evidence for a legal argument is the field known as electronic discovery, a subset of the stage known as discovery in the performance of civil litigation. This area of legal technology consulting services deals with information that is found and based in an electronic format, which is known officially as ESI (Electronically Stored Information). Due to the new use of Electronically Stored Information for the performance of legal technology services, the Federal Rules for Civil Procedures were made subject to amendments made to register these shifts in overall legal technology consulting functions on December 1, 2006. Professionals involved in the presentation of legal technology functions should expect to be actively engaged in the use of these techniques for disseminating information.
With the widespread adoption of new communication functions including instant messaging services in the first decade of the 21st century, regulations dealing with the field of legal technology were faced with the need to define the circumstances under which the large amounts of data produced by these services could be demanded for citation and presented during civil trials. A primary task for legal technology consulting firms lies in the custodianship of Electronically Stored Information and the avoidance of the various degenerative factors that can afflict such forms of data. One question for the implementation of legal technology is raised by the possible relevance of the existence of metadata, which might be understood by prospective legal technology consulting professionals to be essentially “information about information,” which may be as relevant to the unfolding of a case of civil litigation as the contents intended to be displayed by the data in its original form.
Another legal technology issue has resulted from the question of which format should be employed that will yield the most useful and relevant basis for understanding the content of an article of Electronically Stored Information. The original form in which an article of Electronically Stored Information is discovered is usually identified as the “raw” or “native” state of the data. Often a responsibility for the professionals associated with a legal technology consulting firm will lie in the conversion of this raw state of the data into a format that is easily viewed by a court for the purposes of making reliable judgments, often as TIFF images.