Friday 22 August

I am sitting by a hotel pool in Pasadena as I type this. The sun reflects off white buildings and blue water. Bronzed beauties recline a few feet away, and it hard to recall that I tried to buy a pair of Wellington boots a couple of days ago to cope with the English summer.

The closest reminder of England is the Beckham Grill opposite, complete with an old London cab on a stand outside. Perhaps the waitresses wear Beefeater costumes and say “Am I bovvered?” to enhance the restaurant’s claim to Englishness, just as English people adopt a drawl and wear a big hat to convey that they are being American. Cultural differences are a little more subtle than that.

My visit is very much to do with the UK. I am here to see Guidance Software whose EnCase® applications are used internationally for the identification and forensically-sound collection of data for litigation, investigations and regulatory compliance. The UK is an important part of their international market, and they are sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project which I run. It is, of course, the people I am here to see, not the company.

This is consistent with one of my recurring themes in my speaking and writing about electronic discovery, that buying decisions are made by people and that people buy from people they know, respect and trust. It is not in fact a pre-requisite that they like them as well, but it helps as, indeed, does anything which humanises any commercial transaction.

It is a truism of commercial life that the bigger an organisation gets the harder it is for it to maintain the sense that it is made up of real people. That difficulty is amplified when the seat of the company’s operations is the other side of the world, as Guidance is from my largely UK audience. Even when the physical gap is narrowed (Guidance has an office with a growing staff in Slough), other factors are involved. I am, for example, only a few feet from the leggy lovelies in the hotel pool, but all sorts of barriers stand between me and them. The fact that we are within speaking distance and speak the same language, more or less, is not enough to close a deal, as it were, or even for me to start a dialogue which may lead to that result.

A recital of their names (the Guidance people whom I met, not the lovelies) is not much to the point, though it was particularly good to see again CEO Victor Limongelli whom I met in London last year. What matters to the UK lawyers and corporate decision-makers who constitute both my audience and Guidance Software’s would-be buyers is whether the product works, how it fits the requirements of UK litigation, corporate investigation and regulatory enquiry, how well the company understands these things – and whether they are likeable people to deal with. The people point may not come first in my list of key factors, but it is more important than many give credit for. Guidance scored very well on that front so far as I am concerned even before they asked to their picnic – of which more below.

I will come back in due course to the spate of new initiatives and press releases which has emerged from Guidance Software recently. This visit was not really about any of that.  My role is to be a kind of information exchange, telling UK companies, courts and practitioners about the solutions which the market offers, and telling suppliers about the UK rules and practice and the less tangible aspects of the UK litigation field. Much of this information can be exchanged with my sponsors by my reading their web sites and their reading mine, but that gives neither of us any real feel for what the other is doing or plans to do, or for the more subtle layer of awareness and understanding comes only from a face-to face meeting.

Connecting with would-be buyers is not the only challenge which busy, growing companies face. Another is keeping in touch with its own staff, from whom much is expected. By happy chance, my visit here coincided with Guidance’s corporate picnic which they kindly invited me to join.  A picnic is rather easier to plan in California than in England, of course – you may be interrupted by an earthquake or a forest fire, but at least it won’t rain. It is not politic to spend a fortune on staff entertainment, nor is it practical to take everyone out of the office for hours, and a picnic does not raise either objection. It was great fun and a good way of meeting some of the people who make up the company.

I doubt we could have a public barbeque facility in England – some drab little official would raise health and safety objections, and local youths would have vandalised it whilst the police were at their desks filling in forms to meet government targets. I did not set out to compare and contrast cultural and other differences, but to have clocked up (on one side), David Beckham, Wellington boots in August, Catherine Tate, Elf’n’Safety, vandalising youths and the New Labour target culture on the one hand, and poolside beauties and barbeques on the other, may appear to show a bias in favour of California. Pasadena is the third US city I have been in this year, and the differences between it and Washington or New York are, in many ways, as great as the difference between any of them and London.

The point, though, for UK e-disclosure audiences, is that the problems, the solutions – and the people – are the same everywhere. Next stop for me is Dallas, Texas, where what is discussed in ILTA’s formal sessions and in bars will be as relevant to London, Leeds and Bristol as to Pasadena, Washington and New York.

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