ESI makes litigation more complicated. Not many mediators and arbitrators have significant skills with ESI. With eMediation, litigants bring their ESI disputes to the neutral mediator to help develop an eMediation plan for how the parties will define the specific ESI they have to search for and provide to the other parties. As a result, the parties can reduce the time and cost of ESI discovery disputes.
Social media is transforming communications, but what many people do not see is how social media impacts litigation. Today at least 95 percent of all information is electronic, and the continued proliferation of social media surely will make that percentage grow.
As I pointed out in my recent column about judges and social media, U.S. Supreme Court judges remarked that they “didn’t get social media.” Since every single lawsuit includes electronically stored information (ESI), these same judges, many of whom find ESI difficult to understand and evaluate, will need to consider the added complexity that social media brings into the picture.