While many welcome modern advancements in telecommunication and automotive technologies, these changes can cause legal professionals their fair share of angst. At the "How Attorneys and Judges are Addressing New Technologies including Autonomous Vehicles, Biometrics and Blockchain" session on day two of the New York State Bar Association's 2019 Tech Summit, speakers dove into how technology is forcing courts and e-discovery professionals to keep pace—and think outside of the box.

Take for example the rise of autonomous vehicles, which many predict will create big questions around who is at fault should an accident occur. Much of that determination will come down to what a car's data says on how fast the vehicle was going and who was driving, among other factors.

But while that data may be key in assigning liability, either to the driver or the car itself, such information can be difficult to obtain. For one thing, an autonomous car can generate an enormous amount of unique data points.

"You're going to have to use more machine learning to even wrap your arms around all this," said Kiriaki Tourikis, vice president and assistant general counsel in JPMorgan Chase's litigation department. She noted attorneys will need to figure out "where the data lies, how to access it, then what to do with it, how to read it, [and] how to make sense of it. … I think it's going to be a brave new world with discovery."

And this brave new world may have its fair share of conflicts. After all, car companies may not be willing or even able to hand over all the data from their vehicles. "I assume a number of these companies will say they have proprietary data, so that is not going to be easy for you to get," said Ron Hedges, senior counsel at Dentons and former magistrate judge in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. "You're going to have to go to a court to get access, and you're also going to be dealing with confidentiality issues."

What's more, "there are probably going to be 40 or 50 [Internet of Things] systems in these vehicles and they may be managed by someone else—[so all data] won't be in the same location," Hedges noted. He added that some of the data may not even be in the U.S. "There are going to be fascinating issues."

To be sure, the widespread use of autonomous vehicles is still years off, giving legal professionals some potential breathing room and, fortunately, time to deal with more pressing issues posed by already widely adopted and mature technologies, such as biometrics.

As more biometric passwords find their way onto consumers' cellphones, for example, a tricky legal issue is increasingly cropping up among courts around the country: Can a person refuse to unlock their phones via biometric access under the Fifth amendment right against self-incrimination?

"There has been a debate in the country, really among states," Hedges said. He explained, "Generally speaking if I have a phone and law enforcement wants to compel me to put my finger to the phone or put a password in, it depends on the purpose of why law enforcement wants it. If law enforcement wants it to tie me to the phone … that's pretty clear that is testimony."

But Hedges added that while there is general consensus that traditional passwords are testimony, there is less agreement over biometric passwords. There is a big split in case law about whether a person can be compelled to unlock a phone or not via passwords like fingerprints, he said.

Still, it is not just the Fifth Amendment that comes into pay when unlocking cellphones. Hedges also noted the Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure is also a factor, though those rights do not apply when police "know it's my phone and want to get stuff inside it. … That may be something called the 'foregone conclusion' doctrine, because they know what's in it already." However, if police are "just doing a phishing expedition for the phone, it's a Fourth Amendment problem."