I have just been back to Hong Kong, this time to moderate a panel of litigation lawyers brought together by Thomson Reuters’ Asian Legal Business and by Epiq Systems. Epiq’s Celeste Kemper was in the chair.

Our agenda was cut from under our feet as we began our session by the news of pending developments in the Hong Kong civil procedure rules relating to the management of electronic discovery. The ad hoc agenda which followed was very much more interesting as a result. I will write more about this in due course. I also had lunch with Paul Taylor and Barry Wong of Consilio, as good a way as any of keeping up with what is going on in Hong Kong.

I came back in haste (well, 26 hours from door to door), mainly so as not to miss too much of the family holiday in Cornwall. I write this from a kitchen on a windswept headland from which sea and sky merge in varying shades of grey washed down by copious amounts of rain.

It is good to be back here. Most of our holidays recently have been planned around a foreign conference and, whilst we have seen some wonderful (and generally sunny) places as a result, I have missed the Cornish mist. We are here partly because this is where we have always come (in my wife’s case since the 1950s) and partly because her niece is getting married at St Enodoc, an ancient church recovered from the sand in the mid-19C where John Betjeman is buried.

I wrote with enthusiasm recently about a series of webinars being given by iCONECT whose first one is called Social Communication: Is There Anything Worth Requesting?   Its theme is the prevalence of new data types created by new kinds of device by new applications and which accumulates around us without really thinking about it. The ease with which we can work from anywhere (a Cornish clifftop, for example) brings enormous benefits, but it brings also the risk that we create data that we do not even know we have got in places unknown to us. That raises all sorts of issues, amongst them the eDiscovery implications.