As you will have gathered from recent posts I am not a supporter of the idea that anyone working in the ediscovery / e-disclosure field must have a certificate to prove their competence. My opposition is based largely on the near-certainty that such a requirement will operate as a bar to new entrants and on the probability that any organisation purporting to offer generalised certification will speedily become a self-perpetuating oligarchy bound up in its own bureaucracy.

I exempted from this opinion the specialised training required for the proper use of highly technical applications – those hiring people who purport to know how to use such products clearly need some evidence that the employee or consultant has reached the developer’s standard of competence, and I cited Guidance Software’s EnCase as an example.

Guidance Software has now supplemented its wide range of training courses with the new EnCase® Certified eDiscovery Practitioner (EnCEP™) program which adds to the bare skills needed to use EnCase by extending out to include planning, project management and best practices in its use. It seems to me to be a logical extension of their application training that EnCase users should understand the legal and the technology context in which EnCase is to be used. This is a step in the right direction.

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