I wrote recently about an event taking place in London on 25th November with the title Improving regulatory and litigation response.
The organiser is Equinix, whose International Business Exchange (IBX) facilities house data centres for more than 6,250 companies worldwide.
The overriding theme in my original post was the identification of the pinch-points in the eDiscovery process – those things which act as a brake when it becomes urgent to collect data, cull the dross, sort the relevant from the irrelevant, and get the important documents under the eyes of a company’s lawyers as quickly as possible. Too often, the impediment is a purely physical one caused by the time taken to move data from disparate sources before the processing power of eDiscovery software is applied to it.
I mentioned also Equinox’s wide geographical reach. The international (for which read cross-border) implications of discovery have been given added point by the Schrems decision invalidating Safe Harbour as a means of transferring data from the EU to the US.
While Safe Harbour was never in fact adequate cover on its own for these transfers, Schrems has drawn attention to the need to find personally identifiable information as early as possible; until you have done that, it is impossible to make the appropriate approaches to opponents, to US courts and regulators armed with adequate information about the difficulties caused by EU privacy and data protection laws. In US civil litigation, for example, it is necessary to get in front of the court as quickly as possible seeking extended timescales and, perhaps, a protective order aimed at reconciling US demands with EU restraints. You can’t begin to do this if it takes weeks to collect the data.
This will be one of the subjects which I will cover at this event along with the equally demanding requirements of UK and EU regulators.
Jeremy Hopkins of Clerkingwell Consulting will talk about changes in the organisational structure of law firms and legal departments which facilitate prompt and cost-effective response. Olli Imoru of Equinix will talk about what Equinix offers to help address the problems.
eDisclosure Information Project 