You may have noticed an increase in the number of posts on here recently. That is not entirely to do with the frequency of things to write about (although a couple of UK cases this week were a bonus); it owes as much to the fact that I am coming to the end of the autumn’s events. Two more will have dropped off the calendar after this week and, odds and ends apart, I am done until Legaltech in February and can get on with other things.

There were supposed to be three events this week, with a day trip to Frankfurt on Tuesday to do an eDiscovery Q&A with David Wallack, General Counsel at NightOwl Discovery. That fell foul of a strike by Lufthansa, who cancelled my return flight and offered me one the following morning….

….at about the same time as I was due to do a couple of round-tables with Robert Coppola and Brian Redar of QuisLex at The Lawyer’s Managing Risk and Litigation conference in London yesterday. That was an extremely good event, not least because of the large number of in-house lawyers, many of them very senior ones, who were present – and actively present. We used our round-tables to elicit ideas from the people round the table, limiting our own role to prompting subjects. Some really good discussions resulted from this, of the kind you can’t get from the platform-and-podium sessions which are the norm (there is room for both, I should add). The bigger sessions were similarly engaging and informative.

There was a bonus too – I met Lawyer Editor Catrin Griffiths. We have followed each other on Twitter for years but have never been in the same place at the same time.

Today I am off to Dublin to take part in eDiscovery 2016 which I wrote about here. My three panels embrace Peruvian Guano, the Microsoft Dublin appeal, predictive coding, and Brexit. I wonder if their Lordships in the English Court of Appeal in 1882 guessed that we would still be talking about “the bird-shit case” by 2016 as they sat in the fine new Royal Courts of Justice, formally opened a fortnight earlier by Queen Victoria.

I have lost count of the years since Karyn Harty of McCann FitzGerald and I first did a panel together on litigation technology in Dublin. The world has moved on a lot since then, thanks not least to Karyn’s own successful bid to use predictive coding in Irish Bank Resolution v Quinn.

Then Mary Ann and I are off into the depths of Ireland for three days. We left it late to do the bookings, and found that the hotels of south-east Ireland are doing very well, thank you, without our help. We have one night in the depths of nowhere and another on the cliffs overlooking the Nymph Bank. No, I didn’t know what that was either, but it turned up in a tweet this week and led me to my usual serendipitous wanderings round Google’s deeper recesses. By what chance do we find ourselves booked into an hotel with a view across it (not, I think, that you expect to see much of it) within days of first hearing of it?.

Then it’s back to my desk. There’s some catching up to do (can I recommend Evernote as a place to drop stuff you want to come back to one day?). The accountant always seems to want more information. There is data to scan, data to delete, data to deduplicate, data to tag, data to shred, and whole drives of data to smash. I aim to enter 2017 with a better ratio of information to data than hitherto.

Much more interesting than all that are the things which my son Will and I want to develop. Will has been working on an on-line resource for rules and cases, to be available as text, as audio and as video. We now have a proper video camera and want to explore the potential for using it to present stuff in a more lively way, preferably without my having to spend too much time at airports and railway stations. You need days at a time to work on things like that and that doesn’t happen when there is always another event just over the horizon.

Home