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Texas Lawyer Commentary: When Sci-Fi Becomes Reality – Discovery From Cars, Retailers and the Deep Web

Sophisticated technology built into everyday devices, appliances, business applications and machinery has helped create one of 2014’s biggest buzzwords – the so-called “Internet of Things.” As these devices become connected to our lives and each other, the result is an electronic data retrieval opportunity that attorneys are only beginning to appreciate. That’s the takeaway from Steve Thomas’ most recent commentary in Texas Lawyer.

Thomas writes: As more and more devices become able to gather and store data, lawyers in discovery soon will need to obtain information from a dizzying array of appliances and machines.

Only two decades ago, imagining the possible sources of discoverable information took little time or energy. It was in the opposing party’s file cabinets or, occasionally, in records from a mainframe database. Then came laptops, email, CD-ROM, flash drives, smart phones, tablets, collaboration software and cloud storage. Sources sprang up everywhere, and Big Data became the new mantra.

Click here to see the commentary in its entirety.