Avoiding The Alex Jones Phone Fiasco Requires A Pretty Simple Fix
We all had a good laugh, but...
Alex Jones famously found out on the stand that his attorney Andino Reynal inadvertently dropped the entire contents of Jones’s cell phone in a drive shared with plaintiffs’ attorney and then failed to take the required steps to claw it back. And of course the cell phone data directly contradicted multiple claims Jones already made under oath.
To be fair, “not being a complete dullard” is the simplest fix to this situation. But without defending Reynal’s handling of the case — or withholding the material in question might’ve been a whole other ethical problem — this production would never have happened if the attorneys employed a better discovery process.
This struck me while at ILTACON this year as I surveyed the litigation support products out there. So much effort and ingenuity goes into building these platforms to prevent attorneys from leaving potentially millions of dollars worth of cases up to consumer shared drives and email.
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Chatting with Immediation — a relative newcomer to the U.S. market, but with international experience — the Alex Jones case came up as we went over the product’s end-to-end focus. Right there in the midst of the Immediation workflow is a document share feature allowing users to share documents and control permissions. That’s something Reynal would’ve loved to be able to do! But that’s the danger of using simple drag and drop shared drives, they’re not built with the risks of lawyering in mind. And every touchpoint that isn’t designed around lawyering offers another vector to screw something up.
So, yeah, using a platform with role-based access is a simple fix.
Of course, I don’t want to make it seem like the Immediation system is just about secure document sharing, even if that’s potentially the most embarrassing screw-up they aim to prevent. The platform has modules upon modules to mix and match and offers a means to replace almost everything from Dropbox to Outlook to video conferencing. It’s all customizable, but it can bring all these functions into one highly secure interface.
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The core platform can also be extended to include modules aimed at arbitration or mediation and even tailored for law firm or court users.
In any event, it’s easy to look at the Alex Jones legal team and say, “Well, I’m smarter.” It’s statistically highly likely! But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take precautions. Because at the end of the day you can’t control everything, but you can control your process so you might as well do that.
Or at least understand the clawback rules in your jurisdiction. Yeesh.
Earlier: Alex Jones’s Lawyer Face Plants In EPIC Discovery Fail
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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
