Every week, the Array team reviews the latest news and analysis about the evolving field of eDiscovery to bring you the topics and trends you need to know. This week’s post covers the period of July 20-26. Here’s what’s happening.
New eDiscovery & GenAI findings
The 2025 Ediscovery Innovation Report, a recently released survey of nearly 300 legal professionals, illustrates how generative AI is reshaping eDiscovery workflows and gaining widespread acceptance as the standard for technology in the industry. Some of the findings include:
Time savings and billing changes: Nearly half of respondents say GenAI saves them between 1 and 5 hours a week, allowing them to reclaim time for higher value work. As the report says, when extrapolated across the average size of an AmLaw 200 firm of nearly 800 employees, this leads to nearly 200,000 hours saved across the firm in a year. Because of this, nearly 60% of respondents said GenAI will significantly alter billing practices within two years.
Change in attitudes over time: Two years ago, 6 in 10 respondents said they weren’t planning to use GenAI in their legal work. Today, 93% are currently using or planning to use GenAI in their legal work.
Rapid and accepted adoption: The report found GenAI took three years to reach roughly the same level of adoption that cloud-based eDiscovery software took 10.75 years to achieve. In addition, only 1 in 10 respondents disagree that the use of GenAI will be standard within the next two years.
Avoid these objections
On eDiscovery Today, Doug Austin writes about Wright v. SLWM, LLC, a matter in Delaware Chancery Court in which Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster rejected the defendant’s “boilerplate” discovery objections, granted the plaintiff’s motion to compel, and ordered the appointment of a discovery facilitator “to help the parties develop and implement a reasonable process for collecting, reviewing, and producing documents.”
Vice Chancellor Laster called boilerplate objections “unfair to the requesting party” and obfuscating. He categorized the defendant’s boilerplate objections into several categories, listing the reason for rejecting each. Some examples:
Vague and ambiguous objections: Vice Chancellor Laster writes that responding parties must “specifically object to what is vague or ambiguous and explain how the responding party will interpret the request to make a good-faith effort to respond.” Here, the defendant had objected to a commonly understood term in the request for the “status of the account.”
Relevance: Simply stating “not relevant” is not a sufficient response for the responding party, which must explain why materials are not relevant. The requesting party had asked for materials related to the plaintiff’s resignation, performance, customer communications, and account status. By only saying these requests were not relevant without any explanation, the responding party opened itself up to a rejection by the court.
Furthermore, because the defendant didn’t substantially justify its objections, it was ordered to pay the plaintiff’s expenses, including attorneys’ fees, incurred pursuing its motion. Said Vice Chancellor Laster: “That natural consequence forces the Company to internalize the burdens that its improper objections created.”
Other recent eDiscovery news and headlines:
