Adam Losey (JD 09) and Samir Mathur (JD 09) formed IT-Lex, a legal education nonprofit.

By Felicia Holloman
Law student writer

“The bar is very low for technology law humor,” observed Samir Mathur (JD 09). This was all the more reason for Mathur, Adam Losey (JD 09), Ralph Losey (JD 79), and Catherine Losey (JD 09) to form IT-Lex, a legal education nonprofit that promotes educational and literary advancement in the field of technology law.

Technology law (as defined by IT-Lex) covers legal issues regarding information security, privacy, and electronic discovery—all rapidly evolving areas of law that pose challenges to lawyers across the country.

Adam Losey compared the ever-evolving field of technology law to the “wild West. . . . It is interesting because we are creating the law, and watching collisions between antiquated legal doctrines and modern technological realities,” he said.

The idea for IT-Lex began last summer when Losey, and other attorneys and judges sent a letter to Above The Law, a popular legal blog. The letter discussed the importance of electronic discovery, or eDiscovery, and inspired Losey to create an organization that promoted education and scholarship in the burgeoning field of technology law, and that offered a merit-based way for the best and brightest law students to be integrated with leading scholars and practitioners (and to win cash prizes, to boot).

“If you understand technology law, you can add value from day one at nearly any law firm,” said Losey. As an attorney with Foley & Lardner LLP, Losey finds technology law a reoccurring topic in his work, and is a founding member of Foley’s brand-new eDiscovery and Data Management practice group.

Outside of work, both Losey and Mathur emphasized the importance of technology and its applicable laws in our daily lives.

“I brush my teeth with it every morning,” said Losey, who also builds computers as a hobby. In law school, Losey wrote a law review article on an eDiscovery issue that helped him to get a job teaching the same subject at Columbia University.

Although Mathur did not have a background in technology law before IT-Lex, he considers himself a “tech guy,” who is familiar with social networking sites and the latest technology products.

Mathur became involved in IT-Lex through Losey, whom he had known throughout law school. They lived a few blocks from each other on Second Avenue while attending UF Law.

Mathur is now the managing director of IT-Lex. He runs its website, which features twice daily posts covering technology law news.

The blog posts, submitted by law student interns and sometimes practitioners, are written in a style to make them entertaining for the less technology-savvy. “We try very hard to make them readable to those who can’t program their VCR’s and experts alike — a challenge indeed,” said Mathur.

The website also features videos of Losey, Mathur, and others explaining topics concerning technology law with skits and gags.

“Adam got slapped by his wife while speaking binary code in one, we had multiple takes for that one at his wife’s request,” noted Mathur when describing the lengths they went to create an entertaining video presentation on metadata.

However, Losey and Mathur also plan to make IT-Lex a scholarly venture with an anticipated journal publication. Submissions are reviewed by the members of IT-Lex, who are tasked with editing and generally prepping the articles for print.

Members are invited to join the organization based on their scholarship and work in the field of technology law. Current members include Ralph Losey (JD 79), Bill Hamilton  (JD 83), Francisco Ferreiro (JD 08), Catherine Losey (JD 09), and Jason Pill (JD 09); all UF Law alumni.

Meanwhile, a writing contest, sponsored by Foley & Lardner, is open to all law students who wish to have their technology law-related articles published in the first IT-Lex journal. The contest deadline is May 1. The grand prize winner will receive $5,000. However, all winners will get an invitation to become members of the organization and present their papers at a conference for those affiliated with IT-Lex.

The IT-Lex conference, called “Innovate,” will be held in Orlando, Fla. on Oct. 17 through 18, 2013.

“The hope is to get 100 to 200 attendees,” said Losey of the turn out to Innovate. The ultimate goal of the conference is to allow young lawyers and current practitioners to network and discuss all things technology law.

For more information on IT-Lex and how to become a friend of the organization, please visit: http://www.it-lex.org.

William Hamilton (JD 83) emphasized the importance of handling and sharing electronically stored information speaking April 8 at the Martin H. Levin Advocacy Center. (Photo by Nicole Safker)

By Brandon Breslow
Student Writer

As William Hamilton (JD 83) addressed members of the North Central Florida Chapter of the Federal Bar Association (FBA), he held an ordinary laptop, standard in weight and design. But to Hamilton, it was the potential equivalent of 12,500 storage boxes of discovery documents, and it needed to be handled with care.

Hamilton, a partner of Tampa’s Quarles & Brady LLP, and Adam Losey (JD 09), an associate with Orlando’s Foley and Lardner LLP, explained the tactical advantages and obligations of using and managing digital information at the chapter’s conference. The pair presented “Federal Practice in the Electronic Age: Don’t Be A Dinosaur” on April 8 in the Martin H. Levin Advocacy Center at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

“It is absolutely essential for litigators to know how to handle and share electronically stored information (ESI),” said Hamilton, who is also a UF Law adjunct professor teaching electronic discovery (e-discovery). “ESI is dramatically different from paper and litigators need new skills to get the best results for their clients while avoiding sanctions that are on the rise for mishandling ESI.”

The major difference for more experienced litigators is the volume of ESI in their cases. One printed gigabyte of ESI will fill 50 storage boxes and will cost $10,000 to review. Each important witness in an average case provides about five gigabytes of ESI that will need to be collected and reviewed. Assuming a case requires five to 10 of these witnesses, the costs of reviewing ESI can be overwhelming if it is treated the same way as paper documents. But Hamilton and Losey seek to handle ESI differently.

“The ESI advantage is that electronic files are searchable, while paper is not,” Hamilton said, “and it’s important that litigators, new and old, learn the tools to do it properly.”

If ESI is handled incorrectly, the case will slow down and costs will go up, said Losey, who became interested in e-discovery through the work of his father, Ralph Losey (JD 79).

Adam Losey was a student in Hamilton’s first e-discovery class at UF Law and has since become a recognized expert in the field. He now teaches e-discovery as an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

Losey emphasized the importance of ESI during the pre-trial discovery conference, also known as the 26(f) conference as it is governed by Rule 26 of Federal Civil Procedure.

“If you handle this conference wrong,” Losey said, “you do your client a great disservice.”

A common mistake during the 26(f) conference is miscommunication between the parties of the lawsuit in how to share, preserve and manage the ESI in the case.

“Frequently, the attorneys don’t have the language or understanding necessary to have a productive 26(f) conference,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton and Losey agree that these mistakes lead to increases in costs that would otherwise be unnecessary.

“Our end goal was to help litigators win, reduce costs and speed up litigation,” Hamilton said.

UF Law was one of the first law schools to offer a regular course in e-discovery, taught by Hamilton, so that students may study the emerging field within litigation. Ralph Losey offers an online e-discovery course for UF Law students in the summer.

“It was appropriate that we held this conference at UF Law because UF has been at the cutting edge of e-discovery for years,” Hamilton said.

• “Student Government is taken seriously by both UF, students’ (Feb. 24, 2010, Gainesville Sun)
  Little told the Gainesville Sun that the claim that students are participating in a mock government might have carried more weight decades ago, before the voting age was dropped to 18 from 21. UF law professor emeritus Joe Little, an attorney for the online voting group, argued that university student governments were created under state law. In addition, the Florida Constitution created university boards of trustees and the Florida Board of Governors to oversee state universities. Both bodies include former student government presidents as members. Little said the claim that students are participating in a mock government might have carried more weight decades ago, before the voting age was dropped to 18 from 21. Now, students come to the UF campus officially as legal adults, so he said the argument is outdated. “It’s just inconsistent with today’s world,” Little said.

E-discovery writer Ralph Losey addresses those in attendence at the Sedona E-Discovery Evening held at the UF Levin College of Law.

It’s time for the legal profession to move into the 21st century and for law students to consider a new and rapidly expanding field.

A distinguished group of experts spoke about the importance of electronic discovery at Tuesday’s “E-Discovery Evening,” which was co-sponsored by The Sedona Conference and the Levin College of Law.

Noted e-discovery writer Ralph Losey stressed how different the world has become with modern technology and how lawyers are doing a poor job adapting.

“We’ve been graduating people out of law school who are prepared to practice law in the 19th century,” said Losey, a shareholder at Akerman Senterfitt. “They’re prepared to work with Abe Lincoln, who had a partner and an associate. They went through papers, and they went to a trial courtroom.”

Law students are still generally trained to review a limited number of documents and build a case around what is given to them. But today’s cases can have millions of electronic documents in a variety of formats that have to be reviewed, Losey said.

“You’re not trained to deal with 5 million documents. Cases now – with just 10 witnesses in a corporation – they’re going to have millions of documents,” Losey said. “You cannot look at each document. That’s the real world; it’s not the Abe Lincoln world of just having a few paper documents.” Patrick Oot, Verizon’s director of electronic discovery and senior counsel, gave the example of Verizon buying out MCI to show how complicated e-discovery issues can be.

There were over 2.4 million documents (1.3 terabytes of date) that had to be reviewed in that case, Oot said.

This required 115 attorneys at one firm doing privilege review and 110 attorneys at another firm doing timeline review. It took four months with attorneys working every day for 16 hours a day to finish the review, Oot said. Overall, just the review process cost over $13.5 million for outside counsel alone. Going forward, technological advances will make searching the documents more efficient.

Oot recently read an article that said there were only about 200 lawyers nationwide that can handle e-discovery issues well, but that number needs to grow quickly.

“As our general counsel put it when we first started this [e-discovery] group, he said, ‘This is the only practice within the company that I actually see growing,’” Oot said. “Federal regulatory, litigation, antitrust, intellectual property – he sees those groups shrinking where we’re hiring people all the time.”

With the e-discovery field growing so rapidly, The Sedona Conference has been at the forefront of establishing best practices in the field. One of the principles The Sedona Conference stands for is cooperation with opposing counsel on discovery issues.

“You want to be adversarial, obviously, but at the same time, I don’t think you want to be adversarial on the issues pertaining to what information is available,” said Joseph P. Guglielmo, a plaintiff e-discovery expert for Whaley, Drake & Kallas.

Guglielmo emphasized not asking for something from opposing counsel that you would not be comfortable producing.

One reason the opposing attorneys should cooperate is to satisfy judges, Guglielmo said. He remembers waiting for a pretrial conference about discovery when the judge called a case in which the lawyers argued about discovery issues.

“I won’t get into details with what she said, but she basically told them not to come back in her courtroom again, either one of them – that there would be sanctions if they brought another discovery issue to her attention, because they were things that she believed could’ve been worked out if the phone was picked up,” Guglielmo said.

Ken Withers, a distinguished e-discovery writer with The Sedona Conference, moderated the event. He has been working with e-discovery since 1987, he said.

In this time, two events have made discovery much more important, Withers said.

First, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended in 1983 and 1993 to allow more discovery, Withers said.

“The number of cases that actually went to trial was decreasing, and it’s now less than three percent of all cases filed,” he said. “Discovery went from being a means to an end – getting to trial – to being the end in and of itself. The stakes of discovery where thereby raised.”

Second, the desktop PC has led to the exponential growth in the amount of data in the world, Withers said.

The Honorable David Baker, a United States Magistrate for the Middle District of Florida, spoke about e-discovery from the judicial perspective.

All speakers agreed that this is the future of discovery and students should try to learn about it. Bill Hamilton, a Holland & Knight e-discovery expert who organized this event, teaches an e-discovery class – one of the first in the country – at the UF Levin College of Law.

“Be smart, look at where the future is, look at the trend,” Losey said. “This is where the opportunity lies. Take these courses on e-discovery; learn about it. Nobody else in the firms you go to are going to know anything about it, trust me… There are a few firms, but there are very few, so this is a time of opportunity. You’ve got to study this stuff.”

Added Oot: “If you want to work in this space, you might as well hitch your wagon to the star, because it’s a really good place to be.”