While the pandemic has pushed all corners of the legal market to embrace remote work, it’s also placed a higher onus on judges to better understand the technologies that have fast become a common part of their proceedings. Speakers at Legalweek 2022’s “The Data Law Year in Review,” moderated by David Horrigan, discovery counsel at Relativity, looked at the issues judges need to be more aware of, the state of judicial education and the negative impact of technology on access-to-justice efforts.
Dentons senior counsel Ronald Hedges, a former U.S. magistrate judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, noted that there is new pressure on legal professionals to better understand the risks of remote proceedings. As an example, he said that lawyers and judges should “watch to see what the attorney and witness on the other side are doing” during virtual depositions, given that attorneys can be furtively communicating with their clients off screen.
