Legal Profession Still Wary of Using Metadata

Using Metadata in tha Law

Legal technology, especially the mining of deep metadata for corporate counsels and trial lawyers, is not yet embraced by the legal profession as much as it should be, according to retired legal scholar Emmett Hevereaux.

Writing for Legal Scholars Emeritus, Hevereaux says, in part: “Unauthorized metadata disclosures, the process of scrubbing metadata, and integrating metadata into the jury selection process, are just some of the fascinating facets of this new field of legal technology. Yet a majority of smaller law firms and individual attorneys are not trained in this field at all. Simply put, metadata is data about other data, and is used by every major industry and business today. In my experience, only about 33% of all legal firms, big or small, even have a legal technician available to take advantage of this new branch of law research.”

He goes on to say that the use of metadata can heavily influence client outcome, especially in corporate and tax law cases.

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