www.nlj.com  - “Big Data,” a name for new data-analysis technologies as well as a movement to develop real-world uses for these capabilities, holds big promise. With regard to the practice of law, the impact of these technologies on electronic discovery is likely the first practical application that comes to mind. Managing the burdens of the information explosion, including volumes of data that made manual review impractical, expensive, and less effective than necessary, was the last paradigm shift in the practice. With Big Data tools, the focus turns from managing the burden of large amounts of information to leveraging its value. See, e.g., John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” N.Y. Times, March 4, 2011.

Another practical application of Big Data will be to predict the outcome of disputes with a greater level of accuracy and granularity than now possible. In one interesting study, new insights into the U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence were revealed through modeling and animating the cases the Court relied upon in its opinions over time. See Computational Legal Studies, “The Development of Structure in the Citation Network of the United States Supreme Court — Now in HD!.”

The analytical power of Big Data, however, also raises big concerns. For example, outside the practice of law, Big Data techniques have proven effective at suggesting new courses of action to battle illness. However, there is at least a chance that the results of such a study could backfire against the study participants, by enabling, for example, discrimination against those who are most likely to get sick. In one possible scenario, these results could provide a prospective employer with the information needed to identify potential hires who are most likely to get sick and miss work. See, e.g., Nicholas Bakalar, “What’s a Little Swine Flu Outbreak Among Friends?,” N.Y. Times, Feb. 3, 2011. Accordingly, it is important to question the impact of Big Data. As a start to this conversation, this article addresses several of the resulting privacy concerns.

First, one of the characteristics of Big Data is that the analysis of large data sets sometimes reveals new information that is not just a summation of the individual underlying information. Assuming that the data underlying a particular Big Data project are collected from publicly available sources, do the individuals who provided the underlying data have privacy rights in the new information obtained by analysis? A recent case, U.S. v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544, 555 (D.C. Cir. 2010), suggests that they may.

via The Practice of Law in the Era of ‘Big Data’.