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On May 16, I, along with millions of others, watched the last episode of the TV show, “The Big Bang Theory,” a show I had watched since its first episode in September 2007. For 12 seasons, many things made the series funny and interesting, including perhaps most prominently the steps the show took to accentuate the odd ways the four main male characters acted as geeks.

What may be the most interesting aspect of those steps, from a sociological point of view, is that in the 12 years the show ran, scientific progress in our society has played so prominent a role that being a “geek” is not the oddity it was when the show premiered. The growth of the internet and cellphones, our dependence on digital devices—from cellphones to laptops and iPads to cloud servers—the explosion of accurately targeted medicines to address issues that 12 years ago were considered insoluble, and the knowledge of these and other developments possessed by millions has changed our society such that the characters on Big Bang remained funny simply because of their odd personalities, standing alone and no longer obviously the result of their scientific genius.

For all of these changes in our culture (as well as that of many, many parts of the rest of the world), however, the legal world seems to be lagging. Several articles, for example, report that a large majority of law firms still do not comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an European Union (EU) law that affects large volumes of data stored in the EU but are accessed in the United States, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), a similar American law that applies to all data stored in or otherwise accessing the state of California (which, in this day of remote data—or “Cloud”—storage, constitutes a great deal of data). Law firms are debating whether to continue to use vendors for data collection, e-discovery and IT security or bring those services in-house, seeing cost savings in both choices given the proper variables. Because there is no strong and correct consensus pertaining to e-discovery and IT security, many firms go back and forth between the choices from project to project, which indecision aids neither the firms nor their clients.