This event has now been moved to 17-18 May 2012

IQPC has a three-day conference aimed specifically at the energy industry and those who advise it. Its strong list of speakers include three judges – Senior Master Whitaker from England and Wales, US Magistrate Judge Frank Maas from New York and Judge Dory Reiling, Vice President of the Amsterdam District Court. Other speakers come from major corporations from Europe and elsewhere, many of whom I have heard speak at other conferences. The web site is here and the agenda here.

There are workshops on 17 January and the conference itself is on 18 and 19 January. These conferences used to illustrate the divide between those responsible for information management within organisations and those involved in the obligations to disclose relevant information for litigation or regulatory purposes. That distinction is becoming blurred, at conferences as in real life, as information management is increasingly seen as a continuum in which discovery is built into the specification, not merely a contingency at the end.

My own panel is called Information Governance for Lawyers: is digital overload now the greatest risk management challenge facing in-house legal departments? The other panellists are Paul Salazar, senior counsel of Siemens AG and Patrick Wilkins, editor of European GC. The judicial panel is on day two. One of its published bullet points refers to the increasing expectation by the courts that companies will have an efficient and effective information management system. This is the corollary, perhaps, of the court users’ expectations that judges will handle their cases efficiently and effectively. If judges are responsible for managing cases then they have the right, and indeed the duty, to take into account the parties’ own ability to manage their information properly.

When you add these subjects to the hard-earned experience of those speakers who deal with information management issues in major corporations, the program adds up to an interesting and useful way to start the year.

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