My first article as a full-time academic was Technological Opacity & Procedural Injustice, 59 Boston College Law Review 821 (2018). In this article, I evaluated the use of predictive coding in civil discovery wherein supervised machine-learning software is taught to forecast the responsiveness of collected documents to discovery requests. I detailed this artificial intelligence tool’s effect on the accuracy, efficiency, and participation elements of pretrial practice. I concluded that the technological tools could subtly erode civil litigants’ right to have a voice in proceedings and to understand the reasoning behind legal processes and decisions.

During my research for Technological Opacity & Procedural Injustice, I realized that, while discovery reforms invariably have unexpected consequences, the growth of electronically stored information has led to one constant—an ever-increasing pressure on the finite resources of both the judiciary and litigants. Courts, through their discovery rules, direct where that pressure will be channeled. But, like any force in a closed system, this pressure must be sent somewhere, ultimately requiring difficult tradeoffs amongst accuracy, efficiency, and participation. In Discovery Hydraulics, 52 UC Davis Law Review 1317 (2019), I  explored this phenomenon and offered a purposive taxonomy of discovery reform efforts.

In considering parties’ attempts to deal with voluminous electronically stored, I noticed that private confidentiality agreements between parties were regularly entered by courts, shielding litigation materials from public view. So, in Contracting for Confidential Discovery, 53 UC Davis Law Review 1249 (2020), I looked at the treatment of 100 proposed orders and identified an unexpected risk of permitting parties to customize procedure: the importation of legal errors, by party agreement, into judicial practice.

In thinking about AI discovery tools and the pressure they placed on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, I realized that similar technological developments were creating fissures in longstanding professional responsibility rules too. This realization led to Ad Tech & the Future of Legal Ethics, 73 Alabama Law Review 107 (2021), in which I drew on modern privacy scholarship to explain how lawyers’ use of online behavioral advertising might lead to privacy invasions and manipulation that are not prohibited by existing regulations. I also used this specific issue as an example of why the legal profession has struggled to integrate new technological innovations more generally.

My next article, Fee Retrenchment in Immigration Habeas, 90 Fordham Law Review 1489 (2022), grew out of a combination of my procedural justice scholarship, participation in an amicus brief, and my pre-fellowship work on attorneys’ fees. I analyzed a challenge to the decades-long understanding that the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) covers immigration habeas proceedings. I demonstrated that reading out habeas proceedings from the EAJA is best understood as an example of the federal courts’ jurisprudential shift against the private enforcement of civil rights—that is, the rights retrenchment movement. This case study also showed how agencies used non-acquiescence to selectively tee up issues for retrenchment and magnify the structural power differences between them and the individuals they face in litigation.

As I was finalizing Fee Retrenchment in Immigration Habeas, I continued to investigate discovery issues. I contributed a chapter, Privilege & Voice in Discovery, to A Guide to Civil Procedure: Integrating Critical Legal Perspectives (eds. Brooke Coleman, Suzette Malveaux, Portia Pedro, & Elizabeth Porter, 2022). In this short work, I identified how socially privileged identities can enhance civil litigants’ experience during discovery. Specifically, I walked through several workplace harassment cases in which courts appeared to differentiate similar conduct based on the plaintiffs’ gender and sexuality. I was particularly excited about this project because the book applied a critical lens to civil procedure that mostly had been neglected and, subsequently, has provided the blueprint for courses at Boston University, Cardozo, and the University of Florida.

While I was working on Fee Retrenchment in Immigration Habeas, I also was a discussant at a session entitled, The Civil Procedure Transformation After Fifteen Years of the Roberts Court, at the 2020 SEALS Annual Conference. This conversation made me question the conventional wisdom that there is virtually no appellate oversight of discovery. Following this line of inquiry, in Discovery Dark Matter, 101 Texas Law Review 1021 (2023), I examined the extent to which the Supreme Court’s use of its soft authority is affecting decision-making on discovery issues by providing trial-level judges with a window into the Court’s view of the underlying principles and normative tradeoffs. I found evidence that trial-level court are responsive to the Court’s informal signaling. I also looked at district judges’ evaluations of challenges to magistrate judges’ orders, highlighting examples where the district judges appear to successfully correct errors and clarify the law. Combining these two findings, I explained how the functions of appellate review have been channeled in ways that are consistent with institutional expertise instead of judicial hierarchy.

My next article, Ethical Guardrails to Unbounded Procedure, 93 Fordham Law Review 49 (2024), linked my interests in civil procedure and professional responsibility and marked the beginning of a new branch of my scholarship. Complex limitation frequently presents issues that are either unaddressed by existing procedural rules or which are an uncomfortable fit. The upshot of these gaps is that federal district court judges must innovate to pragmatically manage the cases. In this article, I explained how, if unchecked, these procedural innovations can lead to illegitimate exercises of power, bias, democratic non-accountability, and other serious harms. To combat this, I described how professional-conduct rules apply to guide—or even constrain—the seemingly unlimited discretion of the courts.

Building off this foray into complex litigation and my background with discovery practices, I contributed a short essay, Discovery Gamesmanship in Mass Torts, 74 DePaul Law Review 175 (2025), to the 2024 Clifford Symposium on Tort Law and Social Policy. I discussed specific forms of discovery gamesmanship that arise in the mass-tort context, singling out a few examples that illustrate the boundaries of permitted strategies and their harms.

My current work-in-progress, Preventive Transparency in Third-Party Litigation Funding, 120 Northwestern University Law Review __ (forthcoming 2025), also grew out of my interest in discovery and increased exposure to complex litigation. By grounding the discussion of third-party litigation funding in both the broader civil procedure and professional responsibility scholarship, this Article identifies an easy, uncontroversial reform to preventively address the categorical concerns raised by the practice. The primary contribution is a doctrinal intervention, identifying how legal ethics are an integral part of federal civil procedure and then drawing out the implications for third-party litigation funding transparency. The policy upshot of anchoring the analysis in legal ethics is that at minimum, litigants must disclose, in camera, both the existence of any third-party litigation funding agreements and provisions giving any control over the litigation to the funder. While the framework and resulting recommendation are modest—a first step based on a close study of where the law already is, not what it could or should be as a matter of first principles or other policy considerations—their effects should be significant, highlighting what is necessary to conform current practices to the federal judicial disqualification statute and several nationally uniform professional-conduct rules  while breaking the existing policy stalemate.

In another project, Meta-Discovery, I look at the accelerating trend of litigation fights over "discovery on discovery," which is an important issue. Practically, judicial decisions addressing fights over discovery on discovery are increasingly common and the jurisprudence dictates how litigators approach their discovery obligations. Doctrinally, the current dominant approach ignores the history of Rule 26(b)(1) and Rule 26(g). The court’s disregard also might exemplify some of the troubles with unbounded civil procedure and have unintended downstream implications. Conceptually, the evolving meta-discovery doctrine involves some of the thorniest questions of contemporary procedure such as the role of legal tech in transforming adversarialism and how to manage difficult normative tradeoffs inherent in the use of artificial intelligence tools.