The eDiscovery events run by Today’s General Counsel have a very different format to most. PowerPoints are banned and the format – “colloquium” they call it – consists of a series of discussions designed specifically for in-house counsel and moderated by people able to discuss, rather than merely lecture – on their subjects. There are three lead moderators – David Kessler of Norton Rose Fulbright, Robert Brownstone of Fenwick & West and Michael Berg of Dish Network. In addition, there are moderators for the individual sessions. There are further details and links to the agenda and moderator list here.

My own session is called Cooperation and Collaboration which I am doing with Aaron Crews of Littler Mendelson. This is one of those subjects where the respective rules of the UK and the US are theoretically similar but where the practice is very different. As it happens, the UK courts seem to be driving lawyers away from cooperation, as an unintended but wholly foreseeable consequence of the Mitchell case. We too now face the situation where a lawyer’s duty to his client requires him to take every point where once they would agree. Or do we? Every week brings us a new judgment and a new set of uncertainties.

We have another one of these Today’s General Counsel events in in London on 8-9 April. Its description is here and I will write more about it in due course.

My wife is going to join me in San Francisco and then in other places in Northern California for a few days.