So far, 2021 does not look much different than 2020—many of us are still working remotely, still dealing with tight budgets and still working within often challenging time frames. And we are all deeply fatigued. Leaders in e-discovery are being asked to address specific challenges within the industry and prioritize the health and wellness of themselves and their teams. It's not unfamiliar territory, but the urgency to doing so skillfully is new. We're more openly emotional and people-driven than in the past.

In our first article, we acknowledged the lessons we learned in 2020. In this article, we explore how we (meaning the ESS attorneys/industry) are incorporating those lessons into our work and how we (the authors) anticipate these themes may appear in the e-discovery industry.

Developing efficiencies to address new challenges. Almost a year into the COVID-19 work environment, we are more familiar with what to expect. Much of 2020 was reactive, but now we are applying what we experienced and learned last year. We know that court-ordered deadlines are somewhat less predictable than in the past—some courts appear to account for pandemic-related (or crisis-related, both human and environmental) delays, while others operate on a pre-pandemic timeline. We know, as the e-discovery refrain goes, data is only getting bigger, and our clients are relying more and more on mobile phones and chat/messaging apps to keep in touch with geographically separated teams. These patterns will likely endure; we are not going back to a pre-2020 e-discovery world. Combatting these elements of unpredictability and issues of scale takes thorough preparation: in building workflows that take these elements into account; in understanding a client's sources and uses of data; and in proactively negotiating reasonable limits to the scope of discovery.