As we get ready for the 10th Annual Information Governance and eDiscovery Summit, the biggest event in the London calendar, here are a few photographs from last year’s event, starting with a couple of Sanjay Bhandari of EY who was, as always, an effective and persuasive Chairman

If many of the pictures appear to have been shot in a dimly-lit nightclub, that is because this otherwise excellent venue had almost no lighting on the stage, a common complaint (of mine, anyway) at such venues. The reason why many of them are in black-and-white is that this was the only way of minimising the muddy effect of dim stage lighting.

Black-and-white actually proves rather effective for the shots near the top of the selection below of Allison Stanton, eDiscovery Counsel at the DoJ. If you wanted to convey the message that you do not mess with regulators, shooting her and her fellow panellists in black and white does it.

The next bank of pictures are from a track sponsored by Iris Data Services. The first speaker was Laurent de Geelhand, GC Europe at Michelin who gave us a real insight into the practical and commercial implications of privacy and data protection laws which arise when a European manufacturing company faces US litigation or regulatory demands.

The second Iris panel was moderated by me and addressed the subject From inception to CMC: proportionality in finding what really matters. The panel shown here consisted of Major Baisden of Iris, Vince Neicho of Allen & Overy and Matthew Davis of Hogan Lovells. If you are required to work to a budget (and who is not these days?) the eDisclosure services provider must necessarily be involved in the discussions given the high proportion of costs which are attributable to Disclosure. There is a b&w one of me among this group which suggests that someone might have tried to disagree with me about something.

Barrister Damian Murphy, then of Indicium Chambers and now eDiscovery Counsel with UBS in London, managed simultaneously to entertain and inform, stressing amongst other things the importance of process management – of all the jobs he had had, the one which involved making ice cream depended most on proper processes.

The next group show a panel which I moderated called Disclosure post-Jackson: the implications for corporations with former Senior Master Whitaker, Beverly Barton of Practical Law and Tom Spencer of GlaxoSmithKline. Lawyers will often assert that the budget process comes too early to be feasible or valuable, and it costs money which is disproportionate to any value received by the client. Tom Spencer is amongst the clients who take a different view on this, and he is not the only one. It is not so much that there are two views on the subject as that what is appropriate some cases and for some clients is inappropriate and disproportionate for others.

Craig Earnshaw of FTI Consulting led an interesting panel whose members included Matthew Ward of Barclays and Paul De Gruchy of RBS. What sticks in my mind is the photograph which Matt Ward showed of the range of technology devices used by a typical financial trader. The security, compliance and eDiscovery implications were clear.

Not illustrated here is a third panel which I moderated, with US Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte, Mr Justice Frank Clarke from Ireland and former Senior Master Steven Whitaker. In a lightning tour, we covered the use of new technology, the significance of judicial management, and lawyer competence, as well as the implications of US demands for documents from the EU.

This was a good conference. The next Information Governance & eDiscovery Summit takes place in London on 13 and 14 May. Its website is here and I will write about it shortly.