I am not sure that I can face the battle which is presently raging in the US about certification of electronic data discovery professionals. It is a subject on which I have written before, coming down, in general terms, against demands for a professional qualification and the concomitant growth of a certification industry.

There is no doubt that more (by which I mean better) skills are needed by those who purport to offer services and advice in this most critical and expensive component of litigation and other document-heavy activities. The objections come under various headings: a certification requirement is a barrier to entry in a market which desperately needs recruits; many of those recruits will be people who move sideways from other areas – people with skills we need but who will have not have formal qualifications; a certificate is valueless in the absence of some objective standard and it is hard to see who will set the standard; the whole process tends to monopoly and there is a risk that one big provider will control the new generation’s thinking; analogy with nursing training in the UK suggests not only that we lose good entrants but that we breed a new tier of busybody bureaucrats more focused on their career plans than on the profession; and so on.

Since I last wrote about this, the certification industry has grown as predicted and “Organisations offering to certify electronic data discovery professionals are sprouting up faster than dandelions in May grass”. This forceful way of describing the situation comes from an article by Patrick Oot with the uncompromising heading eDiscovery Certification: Sham exams? Patrick’s opening sentence continues “…and preying on the members of our legal community who may be the least able to afford the ‘services’ and may not realise how flimsy the certifications may be.”

I am going to duck the issues and merely point to some of the replies. The sage Ron Friedmann gave an initial soothing reaction on 1 July, his short article Calming the eDiscovery Certification Waters giving links to the main articles which had by then appeared.

Predictable replies have come in from ACEDS – the Association of Certified eDiscovery Specialists – with an article on the Law Technology News site headed eDiscovery certification: Reader Response and from OLP – the Organisation of Legal Professionals – whose Chere Estrin was interviewed by The eDiscovery Daily Blog under the title
OLP Response to LTN Article Regarding eDiscovery Certifications. The word “predictable” implies no slight, nor, indeed that I have analysed their reactions in any depth, merely that it would be surprising if these organisations left Patrick Oot’s article unanswered.

The excellent Ralph Losey published My Open Letter Response to ALM’s Question About the “Certification Debate” and My e-Discovery Team Training Program. There are not many people who could persuade you that he engages in eDiscovery training mainly for the love of it, as Ralph can.

I give you these links neutrally, with no clue from me as to where, if anywhere, right lies in all this beyond saying that Patrick Oot and Ralph Losey have unchallenged status as tireless educators and that Ralph’s animations – here is an example – are entertaining in their own right as well as being a painless way to absorb ideas; his eDiscovery Team blog contains some of the most thoughtful and most trenchant analysis of the eDiscovery scene.

It is uncharacteristic of me to avoid taking a position on things like this. I simply cannot reconcile my generalised reservations as set out above with the undoubted need for better education, and my regard for some of the people on both sides of the argument makes me chary of taking a position without a clearer idea in my own mind of the pros and cons. Perhaps also I am alert to the possibility that formalised training about the status quo has the potential to embed existing ideas where we actually need to challenge them. This is not a satisfactory answer to what is an important debate and it is something to which I will return in due course.

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