[EDRM Editor’s Note: The opinions and positions are those of Gina Taranto, PhD.]
Legalweek 2026 was a high-energy event – a combination of sunshine, a new location, and the buzz of “AI” conspired to keep the vibe electric. But despite the energy, something was missing.
That something? “eDiscovery.”
What I mean is this:
This year’s conference felt like a transitional moment. A sort of fond farewell to what “has been” conflated with uncertainty and excitement around “what’s next?” The label “eDiscovery” was out. The letters “AI” were in, and they were everywhere.
If it’s true that ‘traditional’ eDiscovery is dead, it’s likely because the core skills we possess – the relentless wrangling, organizing, and extracting information from data sets – have become table-stakes across almost all core functional business areas.
This democratization of tools, workflows, and analysis that we built for “eDiscovery” use cases now enjoys much broader application than being _exclusively_ for Legal Discovery purposes. What teams are waking up to is that the problems discovery practitioners know how to solve are the problems anyone deploying AI faces.
And chief among them: for all the impressive tasks AI does, it is not immune to the “garbage in, garbage out” paradigm. And this is where opportunities seem to be forming most clearly.
It’s fair to say that the new generation of “AI”-enabled solutions is already speeding up the delivery of insights and business intelligence at scale. It’s further fair to say that because of this, while some roles in legacy eDiscovery will be sloughed off, many new ones will emerge that leverage transferrable skills directly and strongly.
Across the board, the future holds huge opportunities to make workable sense of the information and insights that AI-powered technology makes more readily available.
Alongside that, a host of different opportunities to measure and quality and accuracy also are emergent. In support of litigation, investigation, and compliance, we will apply expertise to tackling nuanced and novel data types, as well as develop methods to “follow” data across platforms and contexts surrounding issues of interest.
What’s more, we know how to measure and validate technology-assisted workflows – and how to do this under the withering scrutiny of opposing counsel and the courts. That’s work worth paying for!
Yeah, that’s right…now you see it. Traditional “eDiscovery” professionals aren’t under threat from a coterie of generative transformers with a gajillion parameters. Instead, the methods, tools, and skillsets we have honed have outgrown the narrow confines they were born into.
[T]he methods, tools, and skillsets we have honed have outgrown the narrow confines they were born into.
Gina Taranto, PhD.
The #people who have been on the front lines developing, testing, and validating workflows for decades have deep expertise with creating and maintaining #process to responsibly deploy new #technology.
These are skills that gain new relevance to virtually any aspect of business as “AI-powered” solutions mature. At all levels across organizations, demand will increase for professionals who embody the #peopleprocesstechnology hashtag used to characterize our value proposition for years.
The changes to come for eDiscovery practitioners in terms of career management will be new. Change can be hard, uncomfortable, and scary at the same time it is exciting and even exhilarating. And just like REM’s 1987 hit “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) the quickly evolving landscape of “AI” is unrelenting and urgent. But I choose to focus on the bright optimism and how, in spite of feeling chaotic, it’s undeniably upbeat.
And I humbly suggest that eDiscovery professionals embrace this same optimism. In Part II of this series, I’ll bring in an expert in talent acquisition and thought leader on the future of work, Laura Cloney, founder of LC Talent Labs, to offer her broader perspective on the future of work and navigating a job market that is in transition.
Assisted by GAI and LLM Technologies per EDRM’s GAI and LLM Policy.
