If you come across a good-looking young Englishman in your American city who says his name is Dale and that he comes from Oxford, it is not me – not this week, anyway. My second son Tom is in the US with his girlfriend Nom. They reached San Francisco yesterday and then go on to Washington and New York.

Such a rencontre is, of course, unlikely, but stranger things have happened. We once met a girl at a legal party in London who told us about the strange people who had left an egg in the fridge of a house she was cleaning at a holiday cottage in the Dordogne. She had no way of knowing that we had ever been to the Dordogne still less, as a few questions about places and dates quickly established, that we were the culprits. The double chance – that we should meet this girl and that she should tell us this obscure story – has left me willing to accept the possibility of almost any coincidental meeting. So keep an eye out for Tom.

As he reaches the East Coast, I will be arriving in Hong Kong for the InnoXcell ediscovery conference. No coincidence will be needed there to meet up with several people I know: US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck, Senior Master Whitaker, Vince Neicho of Allen & Overy, Senior Assistant Registrar Yeong Zee Kin of Singapore, Greg Wildisen of Epiq Systems and Browning Marean of DLA Piper will all be there, along with others whom I have met at past conferences. The programme or, at least our parts of it, is intended to encourage the idea that we are all in this together, with common themes, problems and solutions running between the different jurisdictions. That will be emphasised by the fact that it falls to Master Whitaker and me to cover Australian developments in the absence of any Australian speaker.

This commonality is again not a coincidence. All the countries represented by this group of people, along with other jurisdictions, have a shared common law (or, strictly, equitable) tradition of discovery, and it is not pure chance either that brings the same individuals together, in different permutations, on platforms around the world.

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