I have made my excuses in an earlier article for waiting so long to publish these photographs of an event which took place so many months ago. By this stage, their significance, if any, is historic, part of the record of a year already long gone. As with the previous batch (and, indeed, with pictures taken at many venues), the light on the stage was low and the room tainted with a yellow cast which is hard to eradicate.

The first group is of a panel moderated by Patrick Strong of FTI on the subject of eDiscovery points for in-house counsel to do with Big Data, privacy and related matters. The other panel members were Veeral Gosalia of FTI and Denis Brock of King & Wood Mallesons.

The next group is of Paul Taylor then of Consilio and Loren Harper of Simmons & Simmons.

Then is a panel led by Celeste Kemper and Nick Rich of Epiq Systems designed to demonstrate the power of Epiq’s audio eDiscovery tools. A team read transcripts in Mandarin and English and Epiq’s audio discovery technology handled it on the fly. Not everyone would be brave enough to try this live. It worked. It impressed.

We did video interviews with Epiq people which appear, with others, in a separate post.

The next block of pictures is of another FTI panel led by Patrick Strong with Amanda Beatty of King & Wood Mallesons and me. Our subject was the legal and practical aspects of collecting data from the ever-wider range of sources on which it might now be found. The large pile of metal and plastic in the floor beside me is the collection of web-connected devices which I carry. Multiply that by every relevant custodian and you have a complex data-collection problem on your hands (preceded, I hope, by an analysis of which of them is actually likely to carry data which is a) really relevant and b) proportionate to collect and process).

The final group of pictures is of a panel led by Celeste Kemper of Epiq Systems whose main subject was Hong Kong’s then-pending eDiscovery Practice Direction. The central panel member was Registrar Lung (who was shortly afterwards to deliver a judgment called Chinacast which made it clear that his court, at least, would make good use of the new Practice Direction in an appropriate case – I wrote about this, among other AsiaPac matters here). The other panel members were Dominic Wai of Baker & McKenzie and me. This was an interesting discussion, not least because I took a slightly different approach to that then taken by Registrar Lung – I say “then taken” because his Chinacast judgment was all that I might hope for in terms of judicial active management which was one of the things on which we expressed different views on the panel.