7th Circuit ED Pilot Making Some Noise

The 7th Circuit ED Pilot Project is making some noise around the country. Last week, Duke University School of Law was the setting for a major two-day conference on civil litigation sponsored by the federal judiciary’s Advisory Committee on Civil Rules. As Mary Mack noted in her blog post on the proceedings,  “A group of seasoned lawyers, jurists, academics, stewards of Bar groups from both sides of the aisle, the DOJ and staff members from the House and Senate Judiciary Committees gathered to solve problems in our procedures.  Preparation included a wide variety of workshops, discussions and disciplined empirical research. ”   One of those discussions was on the Seventh Circuit pilot project, which was very well received.

That’s good because the project didn’t fare quite so well in the The Law Bulletin Publishing Company third annual survey of Illinois attorneys regarding their experience with technology and electronic discovery.  I assumed that since Chicago was a hot bed of ediscovery companies and home to the 7th Circuit’s project, that most attorneys in the state would have a high degree of exposure to the topic by now, but I was wrong. Only 38% of the respondents had heard of the project and in one of the biggest surprises in the survey, a high number of Illinois attorneys (30%) professed ignorance about the FRCP rules on eDiscovery.

–  Tom O’Connor

~ by CDLB on May 19, 2010.