The Fifth International Computers, Privacy and Data Protection Conference takes place in Brussels between 25 and 27 January 2012 under the title European Data Protection: Coming of Age.

Monique Altheim of The Law Office of Monique Altheim is organising and moderating eDiscovery sessions on Thursday 26 January. I am on the panel, together with several others including James Daley of Daley & Fey LLP, Willem Debeuckelaere of the Belgian Privacy Commission and the Article 29 Working Party, Amor Esteban of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, Dominic Jaar of KPMG, Nigel Murray of Huron Legal, George Rudoy of Integrated Legal Technology LLC, and Master Steven Whitaker of the Royal Courts of Justice.

Between us, we will cover eDiscovery rules and regulations relating to basic principles such as preservation, litigation hold, the EDRM and spoliation, we will look in a practical way at problems arising from cross-border eDiscovery in the EU, and will also cover newer trends such as predictive coding, social media and the cloud.

Electronic discovery is only one of the subjects covered during the three days. The full programme is available here.

A few days later, three of us from that panel – Nigel Murray, Master Whitaker and I – with others, will be speaking in a two-part session at LegalTech in New York run by Huron Legal with the title A GC’s Nightmare: a US eDiscovery Request into Europe. The other panellists are Craig Cannon of Bank of America, Rich Chandler of CB&I, US Magistrate Judge Frank Maas, Browning Marean of DLA Piper US, Vince Neicho of Allen & Overy, and Farrah Pepper of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

The world has moved on in the five years since I first started speaking about the conflict between US discovery and EU data protection and privacy. EU audiences are coming to see eDiscovery as more than just US legal imperialism; US lawyers and courts, at least those who attend LegalTech, are beginning to understand that data protection and privacy laws must be managed rather than trampled on. It is good to have the opportunity to speak to both audiences within a few days.

Brussels is easy to get to from London – indeed, it is easy from Manchester, which is where I will be on the night before our panel at a seminar with Hobs Legal Docs. Any lawyer, whether in-house or external, whose company or firm has any interests beyond its own postcode would do well to be there, and not just for the eDiscovery panel.

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