I must begin this month’s article with an apology, specifically for this article’s confusing title. I have to believe that virtually every reader of this article must be confused and wonder why I am writing as if e-discovery has disappeared. I well understand the confusion. The thesis of the article is not that e-discovery has somehow evaporated, but rather that the thinking in the legal world regarding e-discovery has so changed that, as with many other ideas (and the tools that helped those ideas to flourish) that were once novel—that communications could travel thousands of miles over telephone lines, for example—those ideas and tools lost their novelty as those in the legal community became comfortable with them and thought of them as simply different ways of articulating ideas and tools long used in the legal world.     

Over Time, the New and Unusual Becomes the Quotidian

The legal world is still populated mostly by baby boomers (born 1946-1964) and Generation Xers (born 1965-1980). Given that the oldest boomer would be 75 today, it is easy to see that the boomers and Gen Xers are shrinking over time, that the youngest within the groups and those in other groups make up those in the legal world who actually run things, and that in not that many years boomers and Gen Xers will have all but disappeared from the legal world.