eDiscovery Leaders Live: Bill Hamilton of Fredric G. Levin College of Law

Bill Hamilton, senior legal skills professor and Executive Director of the E-Discovery Project at the Fredric G. Levin College of Law at the University of Florida, joined George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness at Reveal-Brainspace, for ACEDS #eDiscoveryLeadersLive sponsored by Reveal.

Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Florida Law School, Bill served as an electronic discovery partner for his national law firm. Bill is a veteran commercial litigator who has taught electronic discovery at UF Law for the past two decades. He also teaches complex litigation and advanced civil procedure.

Bill is the General Editor of the The LexisNexis Practice Guide: Florida Contract Litigation and the author of A Student Electronic Discovery Primer: An Essential Companion for Civil Procedure Courses.

Bill started by talking about the groundbreaking paralegal eDiscovery program he introduced at Bryan University ten years earlier, a program that focused on the employability of its students. The program trained future litigation paralegals with a particular focus on the practical application of the latest technologies.

Bill talked about the incredibly successful UF Law eDiscovery conference, an annual in-person and online educational conference with an eight-year track record. Focusing on practical issues, concerns and opportunities, the program is underwritten by the UF Law School as a public service to increase the level of competence and professionalism in the eDiscovery world.

Finally, Bill discussed the partnership between UF Law and Reveal to offer hands-on eDiscovery education to the law school’s students and how this will create even more career opportunities for them moving forward.

Key Highlights

• Bill discussed the teaching challenges of hybrid classes over the past year and the gradual transition back to regular in-person classes.
• Bryan University is known for its focus on the employability of its students. Bill described his groundbreaking effort to introduce a paralegal program with a heavy emphasis on the practical application of the most up-to-date software.
• Bill talked about the outreach initiative for UF Law alumni via a long-standing educational eDiscovery conference, free and virtual this last year, that saw 3,000 attendees in its most recent iteration.
• Bill discussed the new paths open to UF Law graduates with the grounding they receive in eDiscovery.

Powerful Quotes by Bill Hamilton

• If you can’t do discovery right, you can’t do litigation. If you can’t do litigation, then your dispute mechanism collapses and the population loses trust in the government and we have all types of collateral problems.
• We started thinking [initially] that electronic discovery was responding to requests to produce; but, electronic discovery is telling the story.
• No law student goes to law school solely for the purpose of being trained to sit in a room and code documents. Yes, that’s part of the process; but, what they want to do is dig into the data.
• We’re long past the world where eDiscovery was just sending people data and having them crunch it and loading it into a machine for you to look at. It’s much broader than that, and law students want to move in that direction.
• eDiscovery is what makes the system work. We can’t have fair, honest, efficient litigation unless we’re doing eDiscovery well.

Connect with Bill

Bill Hamilton on LinkedIn