The webinar which I recorded last week with Ian Campbell of iCONECT and Thomas Barnett of Saito Sorenson LLP is now available online, with other iCONECT webinars, at http://www.iconect.com/webinar-recordings/

The webinar’s full title is Social communication: is there anything worth requesting? Its purpose was to draw attention to the many and varied sources of electronic information which may exist within a company or (crucially) in the possession or power of employees and others who are potential custodians for actual or prospective eDiscovery exercises.

Part of our purpose was to remind lawyers to ask their own clients, as well as the opposition, about such sources. The point is not necessarily that everything should be collected – far from it – but that lawyers should know enough about such potential sources to be able to ask the right questions and begin to evaluate whether the sources are worth collecting. Proportionality (which I defined in the webinar as the balance between cost, benefit and risk for these purposes) is the element which is needed to determine whether sources have a value or really must be collected to comply with a duty.

Tom Barnett made the point forcibly that the purpose of collecting and collating evidence is to create a narrative. The process, and compliance with relevant rules, is critical, but we perhaps overlook the importance of storytelling in the scramble to get processes right.

The webinar was fun to do – and not overly structured, which gave us room to develop our own story within the constraints of the title.

This is the first of a series of iCONECT Webinars on the same general theme. The next one is on Wednesday 2 October with the title Social Communication: Is Private the New Public? You can find a list of other iCONECT webinars here.