In the single generation since computer litigation support became commonplace in American firms, the role of the lawyer as the primary agent in organizing and analyzing pretrial discovery has faded from foregone conclusion to marginal factor.

Ostensibly, this shift away from lawyers personally conducting their own trial preparation became necessary because of the vastly greater scale of information now found in discovery. As electronically generated communications and documents became the mainstay of personal and corporate communications, word was that lawyers could not keep up with so much information and that computer litigation support technologies would solve the problem of analyzing so many documents.

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