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Why Lawyers Hate E-Discovery

By Carolyn Elefant

Via EDD Update, I was directed to an epic post by lawyer and electronic discovery guru Ralph Losey, entitled Plato's Cave: Why most lawyers love paper and hate e-discovery and what this means for legal education. Losey begins with the allegory of Plato's Cave, the story of prisoners who have been held captive in a cave all of their lives. They can only see shadows on the wall and come to believe that the shadows are people and objects. One of the prisoners escapes from the cave and discovers that shadows are merely illusory, and people are real. But when the prisoner is returned to the cave and tries to share his new knowledge with the other cave dwellers, they don't believe him and he is ridiculed, because life in the cave is all they've known. Losey says the allegory works for lawyers, too. Growing up reading paper books and educated on paper in law school, lawyers come to fear e-discovery because it is a new world, just as life outside the cave was for the cave dwellers. As Losey puts it: Just like the prisoners in Plato's Cave, [lawyers] do not know that their beloved papers are shadows, mere...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on August 19, 2009 (boomark / email).