In Best Practices for E-Discovery: A Practical Handbook, I focused on the importance of defensible collection and preservation in the digital realm. While these pillars endure, a novel frontier has emerged: maintaining chain-of-custody continuity amid hybrid workflows that integrate human judgments with AI-powered systems—from predictive coding and AI assistants to automated redactions.

AI-assisted processes offer speed, scale, and pattern recognition capabilities that can dramatically accelerate discovery timelines. However, they also create new fault lines in defensibility. A once-linear custody trail can now pass through opaque AI processing steps that lack human-readable logs, generate derivative versions without explicit version histories, or even overwrite data in ways that are difficult to trace.

To read the full article as published in ABA Law Practice Today, click here.