Singer Jeff Fowler and guitarist Wes Styles performing on stage.

Its not hard to spot the science in e-discovery, an industry that is literally built on software, data and machine networks. While that's unlikely to change any time soon, focusing too closely on the ones and zeroes of it all runs the risk of glossing over the spark of creativity that can help propel success.

And it's not just e-discovery that suffers. John Tredennick, executive director of the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation, believes that the majority of the legal field has been conditioned either by law school or on the job experience to rely strictly on rationality and logic—sometimes to their detriment.  "You can be a good technician, perhaps, if you're good on the rational side, but you'll never be great," Tredennick said.

So what does it take to be great, you ask? In addition to his work at the Merlin Legal Open Source Foundation, Tredennick is also a practicing musician, drummer and guitarist who favors "Grateful Dead-type stuff" and has even performed at Legalweek. While the bridge from there to e-discovery may not be immediately evident, he argued that the best computer programmers are musicians or come from musical backgrounds.

"Even programs and the development of them have a feel and flow and you just know it's right or the algorithms have elegance," Tredennick said.

Which is not to say that anybody hoping to make a sizable contribution to the e-discovery field needs to go sign-up for clarinet lessons. But there are tangible benefits to indulging in activities that help sharpen one's creative thinking.

David Greetham, vice president of e-discovery at Ricoh Legal, dabbles in photography during his free-time. Each winter, he sojourns to Alaska to take pictures of the Northern Lights, a project that requires him to consider not only photography basics such as available light or composition, but also more pressing concerns like how to keep his camera from freezing.

All of those variables in tandem impact the outcome of a given photo and learning how to break a problem or product down into its component parts has helped him in e-discovery. "Why is the client calling me and saying 'this isn't what they need' when they've told us this what they need? I've been able to look at it at higher level: 'OK, let's not look at it from our side, let's look at it holistically,'" Greetham said.

Of course it's not just clients that need to be soothed during the e-discovery process. Attorneys also have to explain any collection or production challenges—looking for the needle in an email stack, for example—they experience along the way to opposing counsel or judges. For Jeff Folwer, leader of the Electronic Discovery & Document Retention practice at O'Melveny & Myers, it's an act that requires a a lot of creative energy.

Fowler, a practicing musician who just dropped his latest album "The Air Nostalgic," indicated that he uses many of the same storytelling skills that factor into song-writing to translate technical concepts into words or arguments that lawyers can understand.

As he explained, "Whether I'm working on a lyric or a litigation hold notice aimed at people who don't typically read litigation hold notices—and therefore we have to keep it as simple and clear as possible—there is a similar side of my brain that I'm using."