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.

In this article, we will discuss the issues of whether and how to make lawyers more geeky and what chance there is for those ways to become established and successful.

The Rise of the Geek and the Persistent Geek Disconnect

There are many reasons why geek stuff has been separated from society as a whole. During World War II, we certainly did not want the Germans or Japanese to get ahold of our atomic bomb development materials or personnel, and thereafter we have wanted the same privacy with regard to the Russians, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Iranians and so on. We have felt the same way with regard to the most powerful digital devices, the various codes used in conjunction with them, and those who developed them or who know them inside and out. We have also felt the same way with regard to medicines and their opposite, i.e., medical causes of illnesses and, as for medicines, companies that develop them feel the same need to protect their secrets (and so their profits).

One consequence of these remarkable developments, however, is that they generally bring society as a whole up the scale of scientific knowledge and, in particular, bring those who work with these scientific developments as part of their professions even higher up the scale. Unfortunately, they have not done so in the legal community to the extent necessary for lawyers to understand the scope of and work comfortably with the applications developed over the last several years. Instead, lawyers typically look to vendors to provide not simply services but the best solutions to problems, such that if Vendor A said it would cost $250,000 and take two months to collect, review and produce e-discovery in a matter, while Vendor B said it would take one month and cost $125,000, the legal client (and, usually, the lawyer's client), not knowledgeable regarding the digital world, would not know whether Vendor A is overcharging or Vendor B will provide only half of what it claims it will provide.

There are several reasons why lawyers lag in their understanding of the digital world. One, of course, is that law firms reward younger lawyers who have demonstrated talent and a strong work ethic with partnerships. A consequence of this means of doing business is that the older lawyers oversee the younger ones, which means that those lawyers who are 50 years old today were 38 when “The Big Bang Theory” launched its first episode, and so have had to have the entire digital revolution explained to them by younger associates, who usually then get tasked with taking care of the issues they have just explained to the partners. Certainly, as the older partners have retired and the once-young associates become partners, the latter group will bring into the firm's culture an understanding of the digital world. This process, however, will take a great deal of time, changes in the digital world will be made during the process, thus diminishing the value of what the once-younger lawyers can teach the firm, and at no point will the legal culture be flooded with true experts in the digital world—as opposed to, for example, lawyers focusing on patent law, who frequently are well trained in the scientific world with which the patents they litigate are concerned.

A second reason for the aforementioned lag is that if older lawyers come to their understanding of the digital world through the explanations of younger lawyers, there will always be a lag between what the “old” group of lawyers at the firm already knows and what the “young” group can teach them. By the time that teaching has been completed, it will probably be time for yet another round of teaching, as the digital world continues to evolve.

The aforementioned reasons for the discussed lag in understanding, however, probably come from a problem not presently being addressed, either formally in the world of education or informally in the above-described explanations of digital technology by younger lawyers to older ones: the permitted self-selection by students, from high school through college and law school, to avoid science and math classes, much less those that particularly address digital issues, and the absence in law schools of a strong curriculum in the digital world.

The way to address the problem properly has been a long time coming and should be put into place everywhere (it is in place in some schools and school districts) immediately: incorporate digital courses into the mandatory course structures of public schools and make some such courses required at colleges and in law schools. English is taught so that all students can read, regardless of whether they are reading work-related materials, laws, novels, newspapers, online articles and so on. Math is taught for similar reasons. History is taught to give students political, social and other contexts for their lives. Literature is taught to aid students in interpreting deeply as well as to help them understand their worlds and themselves. Imagine a generic white-collar business environment and you will be able to trace a great deal of what everyone does there to the skills learned through taking the aforementioned classes. Imagine those within that business environment who possess special skills—accountants, car manufacturers, medicine developers, lawyers—and you will see how those special skills were developed by starting with the classes everyone takes and then continuing until you receive a college degree with the skill set as the major and then perhaps on to post-graduate education and degrees in the same area.

While some schools and school systems offer such a course of education with regard to the digital world, the vast majority do not. Perhaps even more importantly, it is the rare law school that offers anything involving the digital world, save perhaps for a week or two discussing e-discovery in some litigation class, much less a required series of courses that will guarantee that the vast majority of graduates will begin their careers with a keen understanding of how the digital world functions in the legal world, and will carry with them the tools to continue to learn in this area as the digital world changes. Until courses in how the digital world works are part of the undergraduate and law school curricula, and courses regarding what the digital world's impact upon the practice of law are offered in law schools as part of the core curriculum, lawyers will lag in their understanding of the digital world. While math, science and history are issues which, per The Big Bang, have been unraveled, key issues, such as when are all of the required steps in producing e-discovery completed and how to complete those steps most efficiently, what to bring in-house and what to seek from a vendor, how to comply with the increasing requirements of digital security and other issues, will continue to be a mystery to the legal world that needs to be unraveled.

Leonard Deutchman is a legal consultant recently retired from one of the nation's largest e-discovery providers, KLDiscovery, where he was vice president, legal. Before joining KLDiscovery, he was a chief assistant district attorney at the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, where he founded the Cyber Crime Unit and conducted and oversaw hundreds of long-term investigations involving cybercrime, fraud, drug trafficking and other offenses.