Litigation Support

After being snowed in for three days, going to work sounds just fine. We had nearly two feet of snow which prompted us to buy a snow thrower online. This should ensure that the Washington D.C. region has no measurable snow until the warranty runs out.

Across the electronic transom came an e-mail from Merrill Corporation along with a press release announcing that it was partnering with the University of Alabama School of Law to conduct a comprehensive course on electronically-stored information.

The course is entitled "The Paperless Lawsuit: Preparing the Law Student for Trial Practice in the Age of E-Discovery."  This will be one of the first law school courses in the country to provide hands-on training in reviewing actual electronic documents. Using the Merrill review application, Merrill Lextranet, they will learn how to review documents for relevancy and privilege, as well as how to present electronic documents at trial. The course will begin in January 2010.

I applaud both Merrill and the law school for this effort. It is painfully clear that law students are coming into the marketplace almost clueless about electronic discovery. This underscores my constant plea to law schools to teach practical legal skills. Most law schools teach neither e-discovery nor law practice management.

On behalf of the Virginia State Bar, I occasionally conduct law practice audits of lawyers who have had Bar complaints filed against them. As I see how far off the reservation they've wandered, it is always clear that they never had real training in law practice management, which is usually at the root of their problems. There will always be those who are light-fingered with their trust accounts, but more often, simple mismanagement has caused a failure to abide by deadlines, to communicate with clients or to reconcile their bank accounts properly.

If law schools want to send students out into the legal world prepared for reality, they would do well to school them in both e-discovery and law practice management.

E-mail: snelson@senseient.com Phone: 703-359-0700

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