Law School 2.0

Applied Legal Storytelling Conference, Chapter 3

The Third Applied Legal Storytelling Conference concluded this past weekend, and a great time was had by all. There were two keynote presentations to start us off on Friday afternoon, and two days of terrific sessions after that. We concluded Sunday night with a Gala dinner at DU's Hotel and Restaurant Management School.  ALS is becoming a very interesting and vibrant subject in legal writing and clinical scholarship. It was a lot of work, but I enjoyed hosting the conference, and being a member of the conference committee with Steve Johansen (Lewis & Clark), Robert McPeake (City U. London), Brian Foley (FIU), and Ruth Anne Robbins (Rutgers-Camden).

Session descriptions, handouts and PowerPoints, and video of each session have now been posted on the Storytelling Conference website, and you can find that here.

I also gave a talk during the conference, entitled Finding Lost Stories in the Digital Morass and Emerging Modalities for Telling Them, which was about the use of graphical visualizations of complex data. As I often do, I prepared a website of information to support my talk, which can be found here.

The next Applied Storytelling Conference will be in July, 2013, and we will return to London, the site of the first Storytelling Conference in 2007. Join us!

Presentation at the Legal Storytelling Conference

Earlier today I gave a presentation at the Third Applied Legal Storytelling Conference which I am hosting at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law.  My talk - a work in progress - was entitled "Finding Lost Stories in the Digital Morass and Emerging Modalities for Telling them." 

As a teacher of course (and author of a textbook) on Discovery law, I have long been concerned about the rise of eDiscovery.  I saw this coming in the early 90s when I was practicing civil discovery and PCs were becoming more common, but it has really exploded in the last decade.  The problem is that there is just so much information - data - that we produce every day now, and most of it is captured somewhere.  Email, credit card transactions, a downloaded movie... we engage in many transactions and interactions every day that produce an electronic record.

In litigation, some of that information might be relevant.  In a divorce case, financial records are often at issue.  In a product liability case, the manufacturer of the device or drug created a long paper trail in the development of the item and in its production.  So we have massively more data than we had in the recent past, but obtaining it and using it in litigation can often be prohibitively expensive.  That reality has the potential to threaten our civil litigation system - valid cases may not be brought or properly resolved because of the cost.

How many times in the last decade have you heard the term "information overload?"  A lot, right?  But recently Clay Shirky said something (else) brilliant: "It's not information overload, it's filter failure." I think the world of Prof. Shirky, and I tend to agree with him.  And meanwhile, I have been watching with great interest developments in some computer science departments around the country that might help with this problem. These are folks who are working on the problem of how to manage and use large data sets. It is an emerging discipline called "Visualization."  

We humans have a long history of visual storytelling, and this seems to me the next chapter.  The application of visualization of complex data sets to eDiscovery is an important development.  If you would like to know more about my talk on this subject, look here.