E-Law Rock Stars?
David Waxse
When electronic discovery disputes get heated in his courtroom, Magistrate Judge David J. Waxse of the U.S. District Court in Kansas has a simple strategy: “If someone comes to me and says, ‘So and so is impossible to deal with and we can’t get a deal done,’ I tell them, ‘Well, videotape the next [discovery conference] and let me watch it to see what’s going on.’
“I’ve never had to watch one of those videotapes. Just the idea that I’ll be watching it seems to put them all on their best behavior and suddenly they have an agreement.”
Waxse’s influence is no fluke. E-discovery consultant Mary Mack of the Portland, Ore.-based consulting firm Fios says judges who are ruling on the finer points of e-discovery are going to have an outsize influence for a long time.
“The law of e-discovery has largely been driven by a handful of federal judges who realized early on [that] electronic evidence was going to be a big issue in their courtrooms,” she says. “Fortunately, some of them have tackled it aggressively and have given guidance to a lot of other courts and judges.”
Continue reading the feature in this month’s ABA Journal online…
