If Friday’s flurry of activity on my Google+ page and on Twitter suggests catch-up and deck-clearing then that is exactly what it was. The Google+ page was set up for short snippets which, whatever weight they actually deserved, were not going to get a lovingly-polished and fully hyperlinked blog post. They are a way of expanding on my tweets, re-tweets and favourites; the full rationale for this is set out in my post New eDisclosure Information Project page on Google Plus for short eDiscovery posts.

The deck-clearing was needed for two reasons in addition to the obvious wish not to miss good content. The planning calls have started for forthcoming webinars and conferences, and I wanted the weekend clear for follow-ups to them, for other things which need prolonged concentration and for planning for that annual quart-into-a-pint-pot, the LegalTech calendar – I know I will not make it to most of the sessions I mark down, but it seems respectful to try. As today’s posts show, Friday morning’s catch-up was rather defeated by Friday afternoon’s new announcements.

It is perhaps worth setting out what January’s events are, pulling together posts which I have already written about them.

ESIBytes podcast on the New York Model Rules

I am taking part in a podcast recording on Monday 9 January organised by Karl Schieneman of ESIBytes. The subject is the Pilot Project regarding Case Management Techniques for Complex Civil Cases in the Southern District of New York. The more important participants are Ariana Tadler from Milberg and Maura Grossman from Wachtell Lipton who were involved in the Pilot Project.  My role is to talk about the UK’s eDisclosure Practice Direction 31B and the Electronic Documents Questionnaire annexed to it. Whilst the UK was the first to formalise the structured exchange of information in advance of a case management conference, those of us who drafted it were influenced by the lessons, positive and negative, coming out of the FRCP meet and confer process. This iterative exchange of ideas is valuable beyond the two jurisdictions taking part in this podcast.

Nuix Information Governance webinar for Inside Counsel and session at LegalTech

I am moderating a webinar for Nuix on 24th January in which Craig Ball, David Cowen of the Cowen Group and Stephen Stewart of Nuix will extract the key points which came out of the very successful Nuix Exchange in Sydney last October. Its title is The Convergence of eDiscovery and Information Governance, and the details and registration page for this and other Nuix events are here. The same team is doing a live show with the same title at 10.30am on Monday morning at LegalTech.

EDisclosure after Goodale and the Practice Direction

This is the title of a seminar which I am doing with Hobs Legal Docs in Manchester on 25 January. I wrote about it here. This involves more than preparing a talk – there are logistical implications as well, since I must be in Brussels the following day (see below) and then back home again in time to go to New York for LegalTech (again, see below).

European Data Protection: Coming of Age

I am taking part in an eDiscovery panel at a conference organised in Brussels by CPDP – Computers, Privacy and Data Protection – on 26 January. I wrote about it here and the agenda is on this page. The planning calls have begun. I am doing a review of eDiscovery round the world, aiming to emphasise that it is not a black art practiced solely by Americans with rapacious demands for Terabytes of private information but the only sensible and realistic way to manage the evidence for a variety of purposes, including internal uses. That session is followed by a separate cross-border panel.

LegalTech with Huron Legal: a US eDiscovery Request into Europe

We are planning, too, for this two-part session at LegalTech on Tuesday 31 January which I wrote about in my CPDP post. That too, requires planning calls, fixed for next week.

Further away

I was not wholly sorry, in the circumstances, to learn on Friday that the IQPC Energy Industry Conference fixed for 17–18 January in London has been deferred to 18-19 May – I wrote about it here. Whether I shall be quite so pleased about that when it turns up, as it will, in the same week as IQPC’s main Information Governance and eDiscovery Summit in London, possibly sandwiched between two trips to Las Vegas, is less clear.

Other events, further down the track, are beginning to require attention, at least at the logistical level. I have just established, for example, that I can speak both at iCONECT‘s partner conference in Florida on 23-24 April and at IQPC’s Corporate Counsel Exchange Exchange in London on 25 April – my slot at the latter (moderating a roundtable session) is on the third day and the event itself is at Heathrow, so I can [sleep-]walk off the plane and into the venue. There is at least one other potential conflict coming up of the kind which can, just, be managed with the aid of overnight flights, strong coffee and matchsticks which, their primary purpose over, can be used to prop eyes open.

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