This is a continuation of a series of roughly chronological mini-posts following my recent visit to Hong Kong.

And so to the conference itself, in two rooms overlooking the water.   Many events like this take place in gloomy basements, and the whole thing feels different with daylight and a view.

Recommind’s Craig Carpenter and Barry Murphy of eDJ Group kicked us off with a dialogue which took as its theme the relationship between eDiscovery, information governance and forensic investigation.

Craig’s opening slide showed a motor car pulled by a horse.  This could have been seen as symbolic of a number of things; I took it to mean that the power of modern technology was being used at the speed of an older generation of motive power, probably a lawyer.  Craig’s accompanying message, however, was that technology advances mean that lawyers are more important, not less.

Points which I picked out from their session included:

• Predictive coding is already used by regulators, especially US regulators; it is often overlooked that they have to review all the stuff they are given and use the latest technology to do this.
• 60% of organisations in the US are engaging in information governance to some extent.
• There is a convergence between information governance and eDiscovery; the workflows are complementary and there is crossover between teams as the same skilled staff are used for both.
• We are hearing less about cost and more about getting value from information.
• The cheapness of the cloud does not let us off classification –  the greater the volumes, whereever it is kept and at whatever cost, the greater the need for some method of auto-classification.
• Who is in charge of information governance? It does not matter, as long as it is someone at C-level. CIOs are good at getting budget, whereas GC’s get budget only for reactive eDiscovery exercises.
• Social media is the next e-mail in terms of its volumes and the discovery implications which it brings.
• It is becoming vital to define policies both for social media and for the increasingly grey lines between ownership of both devices and content as between employer and employee.
• The younger generation expected to bring their own devices to work and many are choosing their employer according to its willingness to accept this.

There was much more like this in a session packed with practical advice. It was a good way to start a conference dedicated to the idea that eDiscovery and information governance are increasingly sub-branches of the same discipline.

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