One of our favorite writers, Sharon Fisher, had an interesting piece on TechTarget over the weekend about how wearable tech could play havoc with legal discovery in court cases. Everything seen by a Google Glass, for instance, or data gathered by a Fitbit could be subject to legal discovery.
The whole point behind e-discovery is to put all the corporate records in one place, so that they can be managed, deleted when they reach a certain age, and protected if they could be needed in a litigation situation. IT and legal staff have a hard enough time preventing corporate and government employees from deleting things they’re supposed to keep, or making sure they aren’t using personal email and cloud storage accounts for data. So now they have to deal with people running around with little computers on their wrists and on their faces and God knows where else.
And just because it’s all linked to the cloud doesn’t make life any easier, because the cloud isn’t always as reliable as one might want, and because lawyers and judges aren’t necessarily as technically sophisticated as they ought to be.