E-discovery provider Relativity’s Chicago conference Relativity Fest 2024 kicked off last week, running from Wednesday through Friday.
From new product announcements and updates to Relativity aiR for Review, the famous Judges’ Panel, and conversations around justice technology, prompt engineering, and more, the conference covered a gamut of tech issues pertinent to the legal community in 2024.
Below are three takeaways from Relativity Fest 2024.
New Regulation to Keep an Eye On
Attorneys and e-discovery professionals who just finished coping with the compliance demands of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) shouldn’t get too comfortable, privacy experts warned.
There’s a new regulation to keep an eye on the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). The EU-based regulation will apply to a wide range of financial entities like banks, insurers, payments providers, and alternative investment fund managers and is due to go into effect on Jan. 17, 2025.
“How many people still get the shivers when you hear GDPR?” said Amie Taal, a digital forensics consultant with Strategem Tech Solutions. “Well, I’ll be glad to tell you there’s more shivers to come in Europe in preparation for DORA.”
While DORA—which includes additional provisions for third-party risk management, information-sharing among financial institutions, and new incident reporting guidelines—takes a “step beyond GDPR,” Taal noted that it has to be treated in “parallel with the GDPR.” It marks one of the first times that a regulation combines technology and information, and as such will be a high-stakes law to abide by for most financial institutions, Taal said.
AI Prompts Are Discoverable
As a part of Relativity’s new developments with its aiR for Review and aiR for Privilege products comes a more laser-focus on prompt engineering, iteration, and discovery of prompts.
By the end of 2024, AI prompts will be discoverable through RelativityOne.
The last couple of years have seen many organizations and legal teams begin to incorporate generative AI into their workflows. This means that employees have been using the technology by inputting questions into chatbots and various AI tools to retrieve answers. These questions, or prompts, have created an entirely new category of data that needs to be cataloged, evaluated, and possibly retained for discovery.
While there is generally a 12 to 24-month lag between when a new technology is incorporated and when it shows up in litigation, the ability to make prompts discoverable is likely a key sign of generative AI’s relevance in future litigation.
E-Discovery Bad Behavior
Early negotiations between parties for deciding search terms in their electronically stored information (ESI) protocols can mean the difference between a relatively smooth legal process and a tedious one full of delays.
But such negotiations aren’t always easy.
“Improper and untimely objections to discovery requests and general objections with no idea what these requests apply to … [have been] just coming up over and over again these days,” said Stephanie Clerkin, Director of Litigation Support at Korein Tillery. “[Additionally] there’s a lot of fighting—even at the protocol stage … about documents known to be responsive, even if they don’t hit on search terms.”
Clerkin said she recently experienced a two-hour dispute with opposing counsel due to “tactics” like issuing delays around ESI protocols to the point where “we have to ask them for extensions.”
She cited Relativity discovery counsel and legal education director David Horrigan’s article on the matter as examples of key “e-discovery bad behavior.” Per the article, such behavior can include: “‘Puffing up’ document production with non-responsive documents. … Improperly stamping all documents ‘Confidential,’ including press releases and publicly available Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) documents, … [and] refusing to produce relevant documents,” among other things.
