Tired after a series of long flights for short events, I recently suggested to my wife that I might not attend one of the big annual US eDiscovery events. “But they’ll all think you’re dead or retired”, she said. She was right, of course, and I duly booked my tickets.

Much the same may occur to people when my blog falls silent for a bit, as it has recently done despite a mass of interesting things to write about. Whatever you may think about that (you might be quite relieved for all I know) I prefer to keep a reasonably regular flow going and to stay more or less on top of the incoming news. September was rather full of other things, and October kicks off in the same style. The end is in sight.

September kicked off with ILTA in Washington (I wrote about that here). We (my son Charlie was with me) came back with a clutch of videos which are going through the editing and approvals process at the moment and will start appearing shortly.

Then it was off to Huntington Beach for the Nuix User Exchange. There I took part in a panel on the General Data Protection Regulation and other aspects of privacy and data protection, and did a keynote interview with Gerard Ryle of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists about the Panama Papers. My article on that is in draft and will appear shortly.

Then there was some London stuff. Last week I moderated a panel on predictive coding at the launch of ACEDS in London (sponsored by FRONTEO), along with Dan Wyatt of RPC and Ed Spencer of Taylor Wessing (left and centre in the picture below), the central protagonists in the arguments (and agreements) leading to the Pyrrho predictive coding judgment.

This week I was in London for a panel at CGOC where Kate Brimsted of Reed Smith, Ed Walker of DT Group and I talked about the GDPR and Brexit. I took some notes along, as one must for any panel, and used none of them – it was one of those panels which (from our perspective at least), just flowed along with good contributions from the audience.

Today I am off to talk to law graduates at Queen Mary College University of London, in the company of Jonathan Chan of Anexsys who will give a demonstration of Relativity. This was one of those things one agrees to months in advance, only realising when the time comes a) that it collides with everything else and b) that it requires a very different approach (and therefore lots of preparation) from my usual panels. This is partly because the audience is different, and partly because it involves actually standing at a podium and speaking instead of my usual show, which involves having a public chat with knowledgable people.

I get to do the introduction to a term-long course, the warm-up act to an impressive list of London’s eDisclosure experts who will cover a range of topics between them. I have a free hand as to my subjects, and have chosen to describe the range of activities which have grown up around discovery and which use the cross-over between legal knowledge and technical expertise. You may want to be lawyers in private practice, I will say, but there is a wide world of other activities which require similar skills. I will also describe the course of a typical eDisclosure / eDiscovery exercise, leaving the later speakers to supply the detail under their respective headings.

Then with barely a pause for breath, it is off to the airport again for the last transatlantic foray of the year. My son Will and I are going to Chicago this weekend for Relativity Fest. I am moderating a panel on predictive coding with Judge Peck, Karyn Harty of McCann Fitzgerald in Dublin, and Ed Spencer and Dan Wyatt (again). Between them, they have been involved in three big predictive coding cases (Da Silva Moore, Irish Bank Resolution v Quinn, and Pyrrho) from three jurisdictions, giving us an opportunity to compare and contrast between them.

My second panel is called Brexit and Beyond: International Issues and Cross-border e-Discovery in the company of Patrick Burke of Seyfarth Shaw, Ed McAndrew of Ballard Spahr and Meribeth Banaschik of Noerr. David Horrigan of kCura moderates.

We have a list of video interviews to do in Chicago – deep thanks to Mariya Barnes of kCura who has lined up our interviewees, found us a space and generally organised it all. That will take the whole of Tuesday morning, then I have the GDPR panel, and then it’s off to the airport to come home. Not much downtime there.

Then, at last, I get some time at my desk to deal with writing a couple of papers, the backlog of articles, the new videos and the rest. A rest it will seem after rather more rushing about than I like. All good stuff though, and I wouldn’t be without any of it; I just wish that event organisers didn’t bunch everything together.

I can also turn my attention to the remaining events of the year. These include ones in Brussels, Dublin and Frankfurt, plus a couple in London, which I will write about in due course.

I mentioned in an earlier article that we want to experiment with the videos we do, seeing how far we can take the medium which accounts for an ever-increasing amount of marketing and educational output. We had a false start with a video camera which was not good enough to match the output of my Nikons, and are about to start again with a better one. Any time left over from events, papers and articles will go into developing more interesting ways of getting eDiscovery / eDisclosure messages out.

Panama Papers picture by Tripp Hemphill; others by Will Dale

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