The transition from law school to actual practice is a challenge for law students. While in law school, students must develop and refine critical legal-thinking skills. Yet during the second and especially third years of law school, students begin to look at ways to become “market ready” and to develop and enhance practical skills. One increasingly important area of practice where the blend of critical thinking and practice skills is urgently needed is e-discovery. E-discovery is a core litigation competence. Yet only about 30 of the nation’s 205 law schools actively offer even a single e-discovery course.
The importance of providing law students with a practical, hands-on component in e-discovery became clear to me after several years of teaching e-discovery as an adjunct professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. While the current generation of law student is “born digital,” I had struggled to help students grasp the concrete difficulties of preservation, search, metadata, unicode, production and other e-discovery challenges. Students were keenly aware that Facebook could be searched, but didn’t have the foggiest idea that electronic artifacts are coded bits of binary values.
