LegalWeek Interview: Eli Nelson of Sidley Austin

Yeah. I work in litigation and government investigations primarily been doing eDiscovery and really exotic data stuff for quite some time a couple decades.

Yeah. It's kind of beyond eDiscovery, sort of working actually with data systems, cloud based stuff, lots of structured data, kind of where all the all the facts lie. That's right. You know, like, in eDiscovery, we tend to focus a lot on, like, emails and communications.

And I always think of it as emails are where you establish the men's area. This is what people knew and what they were thinking and expressing what their intentions were. But the actus Reyes, the facts lie in the actual structure data, so I really really enjoy playing around with the large data sets and finding patterns and digging around in that because that's the actual stuff. That you're working with.

And what makes it particularly fascinating for me is that you need special tools as well as special skills to actually even work with that if you have a large data file, you can't even open it with the applications you have on your computer. So, you know, you'd have to bring different tools to bear. That's always fun. It's interesting.

Yeah. He said the law he's also a lawyer and he says the law is really about people, and it's about the issues and there are facts. He's like, so when you look through documents, you're not looking at documents. He's like, you're looking for the words to attach the people to the issues of law.

To what your point is, words I haven't, by the way, heard since law school, the men's rea and the actus rea. By the way, if we talk about the law of perpetuity, I'm gonna cancel this recording. But but so it's interesting. Right?

Because that's essentially what he had said. He's a and I think we forget about that. Right? In our conferences like this where we talk about talk about software, talk about technology conferences like this one.

But at the end of the day, it's really about just where is the evidence. Mhmm. It doesn't really matter what the software is or what have you. But where do we find the evidence?

How do we attach it to people and issues?

It's just data. Well, you have the data and then you have the information that is what you're making of the data. And the units that you're pulling the data into to make sense of the information that yields the evidence that you're actually most concerned about.

All of those are are these weird abstractions that we think have fairly specific definitions, but they don't. Yeah.

Just as an industry, we struggle. And I think particularly the technology providers were trying to build our solutions they're adopting the terminology that the lawyers give them and then they're trying to give meaning to the definitions provided and translate that into products that don't really serve us because there really isn't a perfect mapping between what it is we want and how we're defining it.

I think that I've been to all of them since two thousand six except when the pandemic happened. So So you've seen a lot of evolution -- Yeah. -- especially at these conferences. Mhmm.

I would say yes, there's a different vibe, but a vibe that think we're starting to be created before the pandemic when we transition from legal tech to legal week and branching out into areas outside of, you know, eDiscovery and eDiscovery adjacent topics into lawyer marketing and all this other kind of stuff. So I feel that probably just there was a bush to try to expand and cast a wider net and as a result I feel like they the sort of concentration of familiarity and the phases and the topics isn't what it used to be.

At the same time, almost all the familiar faces are still there, so it still feels very, very familiar. Talking about high school reunion.

We're talking about, you know, sitting here talking about the evolution of documents to really data and how legal weeks have evolved over the years. Is there something you're looking for? You came here with a mission to say, I wanna learn this.

Yeah. Quite quite a bit, quite a bit. And it's sort of fun to hear what people's take That is interesting. Right?

The needs are still the same. The sort of the discussions are the same. They just use different labels. And having been somebody who was here sort of at the ground level when email was really becoming a thing.

And now look where we are talking about Chat GPT and seeing that there are so many of the same themes over and over again, being able to provide that perspective to folks who are either overwhelmed and don't know where to start. Or others who have, in my opinion, sort of an overly optimistic view of how much technology is going to change things. I feel that providing that perspective is helpful and it triggers a lot of really interesting conversations. That's a great outlook. Eli, thanks so much for stopping by. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.