My plan to update the reference section on my website over Christmas was thwarted by the time it took to move from Windows to Office 2011 on the Mac – one of those jobs for which you allocate an hour or two and are still struggling with a week later. That, perhaps, is a story for another day, perhaps under the “awful warnings” section.

While that remains on the “Pending” list, the turn of the year is an opportunity to point to one or two resources which I use to keep me up to date. These are just the ones which come to mind today so please (please!) don’t write in to say I have missed yours.

Twitter has become the top source, mainly because it happens as it happens. There is a big network of thoughtful people out there, and it does not take long to build a list of those worth following – UK readers might perhaps start with the list of people followed by me @chrisdaleoxford, Jonathan Maas @MaasJonathan and Charles Christian @ChristianUncut and pick the ones who tweet abut things which interest you. That deliberately UK-based starting-point will take you a pre-filtered selection of US, Australian and other sources whose tweets have some bearing on UK thinking. You can always UnFollow if we or they do not live up to expectations.

Like some other forms of activity (so I am told), participation is not obligatory – you can get value from just watching. Having caught the flavour of the conversations, however, you might like to join in – we could do some more users (real-life users, I mean, not just experts who happen also to be lawyers in practice).

The longest-running source, and still amongst the best, is the list which Rob Robinson keeps called Unfiltered Orange on the OrangeLT site. Rob has been the most consistent source of useful information since I first took an interest in US and worldwide e-discovery, and he is amongst those whom I follow.

The other resources which I use all the time are those kept by The Posse List and Project Counsel. The Posse List has kept up the standard of the e-Discovery Reading Room which it started last year. I refer you in particular to the regular compendium of e-discovery articles and upcoming events sponsored by Applied Discovery. It is entirely coincidental that, at the time of writing, the current list includes two articles by me, which I attribute to the importance of the subject-matter rather than to me personally (they are my account of my pre-Christmas podcast with Judge Grimm and Judge Facciola called Judges and automated coding tools for electronic discovery and my review of Richard Susskind’s law firm technology predictions for 2011). That edition also carries a link to an article on the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel site by Jon Resnick, Worldwide Vice President, Field Operations and Marketing at Applied Discovery, called Taking The Value Challenge Beyond Law Firms And Clients: Making Your Electronic Discovery Providers Step Up. Applied Discovery has just won an exclusive affiliation with the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) as the sole electronic discovery provider in the ACC Alliance program. Jon Resnick’s article may have a US flavour, but UK users will get value from the principles set out in the article when establishing their own relationships with e-disclosure providers.

The Discovery Reading Room also publishes the only regular compendium of e-discovery articles maintained in the UK, the BONG List, which is run by Jonathan Maas of Ernst & Young.

I have been slow to catch up with a set of videos which Project Counsel made at the IQPC eDiscovery Exchange in Munich at the end of November. By the time they had been edited and published, fresh waves of interesting stuff came in their wake, so I missed them at the time.

It is more a matter of duty than pride to point you to the one of me and Master Whitaker – duty in the sense that, having made it, I ought to bring it to your attention as a succinct way of getting messages across about the UK’s new eDisclosure Practice Direction and Questionnaire. It is a perfectly good video and I am grateful for the opportunity – just not that keen on seeing myself on film.

If I am to do these videos, it is time, I think, to behave as I believe other people do on film sets – I don’t need a big trailer, or high thread-count sheets, organic milk or any of those things which the divas demand, but I would like a chair. I have had enough of making videos standing up against a blank wall, with the unnatural stiffness which that brings.

Together, the videos effectively give you a mini conference without leaving your desk. In addition to the one involving me and Master Whitaker, there are interviews with:

Sanjay Bhandari and Jonathan Maas of Ernst & Young

Simon Price and Hartwig Laute of Recommind

Denise Backhouse of Morgan Lewis

Patrick Burke of Guidance Software

3 interviews with FTI Technology

Vivian Robinson QC, General Counsel to the SFO, on the Bribery Act

There were others which I cannot track down just now. I will add them as I find them.

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