SLIDE FOUR

There are also statutory forces driving digitzation.

Possibly the most significant in terms of the future of federal litigation is GPEA, the Government Paperwork Elimination Act, which requires as much government business as possible be conducted by computer by October 21, 2003. The logical extension of that is that the evidence in civil litigation involving any government agency after October 21, 2003 will most likely be discovered and presented in electronic form. Much of it is already.

ESIGN, the digital signature act, removes any legal barrier to the conduct of business, government or private, by computer-mediated communications.

And on the criminal side, we are seeing a whole new set of unique computer crimes, defined by federal statute, that never existed before.