Taking stock of the eDiscovery world

This is a good moment to pause a little and look around the eDiscovery / eDisclosure world.  The wide range of topics which make this such an interesting field are all getting an airing at once. The stream of useful and relevant tweets is such that I had to turn it off to get anything done. If it appears to have a largely US flavour, much of it also has relevance in the UK and elsewhere.

I do not feel under any particular pressure to capture it all as it happens, and there are back-room things – the agendas for three forthcoming UK conferences and a White Paper, for example – which have some priority in terms of time allocation than the news stream which, if its elements are of importance at all, will still be so in a week’s time.  My web site also needs some attention to logos and indexes. It is helpful, nevertheless, to list some of the pending stories, if only to head off polite suggestions that I may have missed them. Since the point here is speed, I will ignore my usual rule about hyperlinking to everything referred to.

My involvement in or attendance at some recent events will be covered shortly. Monique Altheim has released videos of the eDiscovery sessions we did at CPDP in Brussels.  Nuix hosted a thought-provoking dinner at LegalTech which stimulated thought about the real meaning of “innovation” in eDiscovery.  It has been said of the cross-border panels hosted at LegalTech by Huron Legal and led by Nigel Murray that “the substantive information conveyed was top shelf” and there is talk of a re-run. Data protection and privacy move back up the agenda anyway thanks to the draft EU data protection regulation.

Predictive coding keeps coming at us from every direction: I attended only one of the many panels on the subject at LegalTech; hosted by Xerox, it starred three US Magistrate Judges (Peck, Waxse and Maas)  and the UK’s Senior Master Whitaker. We have the transcript of a hearing in which Judge Peck discussed the detail of the proposed use of predictive coding – best wait and see if there is a written Opinion on that, perhaps. Judge Peck has given a three-part interview to LAW.COM.

KPMG’s appeal has been turned down, in trenchant terms, in Pippins v KPMG. I backed the wrong horse there, it seems, but we need to ensure that the case is isolated to its specific facts, and not (as KPMG suggested would happen in its appeal documents) allowed to establish a yet higher bar on preservation.

I have reported on Guidance Software’s acquisition of CaseCentral – the nature of these things is that they elbow their way into the best ordered ToDo list, not just for themselves but for what they say about the industry.

Singapore keeps popping up, most recently thanks to the news that Freshfields is reopening there and because of the liberalisation of the rules as to foreign investment in law funds. This is the jurisdiction to watch, as I have said before.

Careers and employment prospects keep appearing – the subject played a big part in our Nuix panel and webinar, a UK article suggests that information security is a recession-proof career, and I have been talking with someone studying at a US law school – more on this shortly.

Some of these subjects warrant substantive articles; I am picking off others on my Google Plus page whose recent links include a couple of articles on location data as evidence, as well as quick links to some of the strands mentioned above.

Don’t forget to look on that Google Plus page from time to time for snippets and pointers to articles by others. It has a short term use as a kind of extended version of Twitter – short, unformatted and generally a quick and dirty way of passing on things of interest – but also has a slower-burn function in indexing terms. It seems to take a couple of days for articles to filter through into the indexes, which seems odd given that Google controls both and given also that some of my WordPress blog posts turn up immediately, but once there, articles achieve a kind of permanence, available to anyone using the search terms.

I must, incidentally, draw attention to the fact that Google has now provided a tool for switching off the extremely tiresome “Hot  on Google+”  tripe which litters one’s stream by default. If you go to the “What’s Hot” page there is a slider which allows you to reduce the incidence of intruders to zero. You have to do this with each new session –  annoyingly,  Google does not allow you to save your choice – but you can at least get rid of them for the day with one action. My thanks to Boris Mazniker for pointing this out.

As I say, some or all of the subjects referred to above will appear over the next few days, together with whatever Twitter brings along. Meanwhile, I will clear away some of the less public things on my ToDo list.

Home

About Chris Dale

I have been an English solicitor since 1980. I run the e-Disclosure Information Project which collects and comments on information about electronic disclosure / eDiscovery and related subjects in the UK, the US, AsiaPac and elsewhere
This entry was posted in Discovery, eDisclosure, eDiscovery, Electronic disclosure, Guidance Software, Huron Legal, LegalTech, Nuix, Predictive Coding, Singapore, Technology Assisted Review. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s