eDisclosure Information Project

I have already expressed my respect for the way in which Fred Gyebi-Ababio has brought his new LawTech Europe Congress from a standing start to an impressive-looking program.

The conference home page now sports a video which reinforces my impression that Fred knows his stuff. Contributions from Charles Christian, from local service providers and from Fred himself do a really good job of promoting the event which, as I have said before, other conference organisers might learn from.

Here is the introductory video from the events home page.

In this one, Charles Christian talks about the speakers and about the aims of LTEC

Here is Monique Altheim interviewing Fred over Skype – a format which works surprisingly well

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Justice requires full disclosure of all potentially relevant electronic documents. Lawyers will always take the lead in managing electronic disclosure / eDiscovery. It is impossible to budget for the costs of litigation. Judges making disclosure orders just tick default boxes and leave the parties to get on with it.

Most people with any knowledge of litigation in the UK would nod agreement at all the statements given above. They are part of the fabric of disclosure / discovery, some of the comfortable assumptions which lawyers bring to the litigation process. All were challenged at the Information Governance and eDiscovery for Financial Services conference held at Canary Wharf a few days ago.

Assumptions, of course, derive from all sorts of things – from the way things have always been or because of prejudices based on past experience or even a legend. I had certain assumptions, for example, about the hotel to which I was allocated – a Holiday Inn across the river in Sarf London. I pictured a cheap modern block full of truckers and back-packers, sitting in a wasteland of industrial estates, elevated dual carriageways, roundabouts and car parks, inhabited by gangs whose social interaction is conducted with sawn-off shotguns and knives. The last part of this impression, the prejudices of one who watched The Long Good Friday at an impressionable age, proved to be wrong – that part of London is too desolate even for the gangsters. The rest of it was only too accurate. They need to level the whole area and start again.

That second week in September saw the anniversary of the last time that part of London was razed to the ground – the photograph below shows a Heinkel III at 6.48pm on 7 September 1940, the first day of the Blitz. Continue reading →

This is the third of five posts about ILTA 2013. The preceding one ended with the observation that there was much to gain from just talking with people. That may include application-specific tips, ideas about department organisation or training, and pointers to things to try and avoid. This post covers the mood of the conference. Where are we going as an industry?

Part of the point of talking to so many people is a kind of crowd-sourcing of opinion. What is the mood? What developments are coming up? What are the lawyers asking, and are their clients asking anything different? It was quite interesting being in the same venue as the conference of three years ago because that somehow evoked the mood of the time. People were handing round their CVs that year, either already unemployed or hoping to jump ship because they could see water at the gunwales. The talk then was of clients deferring litigation, collecting data and stockpiling it against possible future action; there were rumours of bankers and shareholders who were putting in more money because they stood to lose so much if the company went down. It rather coloured the mood of that year’s conference.

This year felt different. After a while in this game you get to see behind what the mouth says and at the often rather different message coming from the eyes or from the tone of voice.  Using that rough-and-ready approach, I would say that there are a few players in this market who are doing very well, many who are just keeping afloat and will pull through, and a few who won’t be here next year (you don’t need to be very clever to make such an observation in a recession; the bit which counts is that some are doing very well). There are rumours of at least one significant acquisition – by “significant”, I mean that a major player will buy a strong but smaller niche player to give it new markets and not merely talent and client lists.  I suspect that quite a lot of the conversations going on around the Gaylord were between providers rather than involving clients – not the desperate circulation of CVs as in 2009, but quiet hints of greener grass or of a willingness to move if the terms were right. Continue reading →

I usually come only once to Washington in a year, with the Masters Conference as an annual fixture.  This year, I will be in Washington three times within a few weeks, but that does nothing to diminish my appreciation of this always informative event.

There are changes this year. Most significantly, the Masters Conference has moved from the echoing concrete labyrinth which is the Ronald Reagan Center to the much more conference-friendly Grand Hyatt. Second, It has appointed Lisa Lehman as its director. Third, but by no means least, it has undertaken a series of smaller events during the year, establishing itself as a leading player in eDiscovery education.

This year’s conference title is Information Convergence: Creating Synergy Between Compliance, Discovery and Security – the conference summary is here. I am involved in two international panels, put together in conjunction with Amor Esteban of Shook, Hardy & Bacon. He and I spoke together on international eDiscovery in Brussels last January, and were also on the comprehensive panel organised by Nigel Murray of Huron Legal at LegalTech. Amor’s supervisory role in the production of the Sedona Conference International Principles on Discovery, Disclosure & Data Protection makes him the ideal person for this kind of panel.

I will write more about this conference in due course.  The main point in writing about it now is to draw your attention to what are described as all-inclusive packages available until September 4, 2012 which include three days of CLE education and three hotel nights at the Grand Hyatt for $1,599. To register online for the Masters Conference, visit www.themastersconference.com.

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Online evidence and investigations specialist Cernam, who organised the extremely successful e-Discovery Ireland 2011 conference, are thinking of running it again. They are sensibly trying to gauge interest before committing to it, and have set up a web page to solicit our views, including the best month for it. I have said that I will do it on any date where I am not supposed to be somewhere else.

Last year, through no fault of Cernam, the conference was sandwiched between a conference in Washington and one in Singapore, and I saw no more of Dublin than is visible from a cab window on the way to the airport. I hope to do better next time.

One tangible result from last year’s conference is that I heard Mr Justice Frank Clarke speak and sat next to him at dinner. When IQPC were organising their Information Governance and eDiscovery Strategy Exchange for Washington this autumn (19 to 21 September) they wanted as broad a jurisdictional range as possible for the judicial panel. I  suggested that they approach Mr Justice Clarke and, as a result, he is speaking both in Washington (where I am the Moderator) and at IQPC’s Munich eDiscovery event on 27 to 29 November. I will write separately about both these conferences shortly.

Meanwhile, pleased do register your interest in the Dublin conference.

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A kind reader drops me a line to observe that more than a week has gone by without an article from me. The intermission is nothing to do with a lack of raw material – I still have the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat to write up, there is at least one article left over from the Nuix Information Governance Forum in June,  announcements keep pouring out of the providers, and there are pending conferences to plan and write about.

All this would normally have kept me in full flow during August, quite apart from my annual resolution to use the summer for all that defensible deletion which we urge on others and for dealing with the 1,000 plus photographs which I took in California. I had just finished clearing the decks for this when my 83-year-old mother fell over.

We dropped everything and rushed for Suffolk, me thankful that a life spent in airport lounges means that most of my apps and data are accessible from anywhere. Some anxious days have followed.

My tweets take up the story:

Hospital to Mother: There is good news and some not so good news – you did not break either your leg or your hip in your recent fall…

…however, you’ve had a heart attack, something on your lung and an operation to do on something else. No rush – tomorrow should be fine

Tough, the generation which lived through the Blitz. Response to the risk assessment: “Well why don’t you get on with it then?”

Result of op – Mother 1 : Reaper 0  Unqualified praise and thanks to Ipswich Hospital and the NHS

To their credit, whoever is in charge of social media at Ipswich Hospital picked up this reference notwithstanding that I did not give their twitter handle. They thought my last tweet was “unconventional” but were keen to pass on our thanks to the relevant department.

I will spare you the details, but after several days spent in the area in case we are sent for, we are no clearer as to the possible outcome beyond her survival of last week’s operation. A rally is followed by a relapse, good news on one front accompanied by less good news on another.  It makes it difficult to plan for more than today – and the luxury of taking each day as it comes expires when I must set off for ILTA in Washington next saturday.

The articles which I published this week all existed as drafts before I set off.  I am gradually picking my way through the telephone appointments, interviews, podcasts etc which I cancelled last week and generally trying to combine “business as usual” with the far from usual circumstances in which I find myself.

If I have failed to follow up something with or for you, please remind me.

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I am back from nearly three weeks in the US and catching up slowly. Changing time zones does not bother me much, but it is tiresome how the world declines to stand still when one is away. I have already written about the first part of the trip – see A holiday interval in California – which brought us (my wife Mary Ann was with me) to Carmel, just south of Monterey where the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat was due to take place. I will write about that in due course and say no more for now than that I enjoyed it, met up with some good people, heard some useful sessions and took part in a couple of them. The accounts by Charles Skamser and by Greg Buckles will, in any event, tell you much of what went on.

We went on from there to San Francisco, a city we are happy just to walk around – or climb around, as our hotel stood at the peak of Nob Hill and every journey had to end in near-vertical mountaineering. It is a good place to shop in, and to photograph, with distant views alternating with finely-decorated houses.

The chief interest beyond our own activities came from back home, where three matters of legal interest unfolded whilst we were away. I started writing about them – the draft is headed Plod the Thug and Runt the Olympic Enforcer, but then the Twitter Joke Trial came to an end, and the addition of and DPP the First-Class Prat made for an unwieldy title [see footnote as to a subsequent “clarification” from the CPS]. It became more important to capture interesting articles by others, and I did this on my Google Plus site mainly to make sure that I did not lose them myself. They illuminate the points which I cover below. There are also a few eDiscovery posts there which I will summarise in a separate post. Continue reading →

As you may have gathered from my relative silence in these pages, I am on holiday. The primary reason for being in California is to attend the Carmel Valley eDiscovery Retreat which has moved from the place which gave it its name to nearby Monterey.

This event is only its second year. I dropped by as a delegate last year, intrigued by the ambition of its founder, Chris La Cour, in setting up a new conference in midsummer in a remote coastal corner of the US, and by his impressive list of speakers.

Those included US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck, whose keynote speech provided me with the material for my most widely-read article last year. Those of us who heard it may not have predicted the startling events which followed as Judge Peck’s speech mutated from a speech into his article Search, Forward and thence into the most widely-discussed judicial opinion of 2012, but we certainly felt that the ground was moving under our feet as he spoke.

I am back this year as a panelist. As you can see from the list of speakers, I am in distinguished company.

Last year, my wife Mary Ann and I used the conference as a springboard for a road trip, driving from San Francisco down to Cambria, and then north via the conference up to Point Reyes, Mendocino and Fort Bragg.

This year we started in Las Vegas, flying from there to Los Angeles where we picked up a car. After a couple of nights at Pasadena, we drove north, staying at Santa Barbara, and Cambria, before fetching up at Carmel. I am writing this from the verandah of a room overlooking the sea at the Mission Ranch, a place rescued from development by Clint Eastwood (former mayor of Carmel) and turned into an extremely pleasant hotel. We move to Monterey on Sunday night for the conference.

We have seen the most beautiful things on this trip – collections of European and American art, Hearst Castle, missions, landscapes and sea views, and animals and birds. We moved from Gainsborough, Romney and Hopper to otters, seals and hawks to mountains, beaches and forests. We have seen where Pretty Woman shopped in Beverley Hills, where Hearst entertained Chaplin and Churchill at San Simeon and where Orson Welles bought a cabin for Rita Hayworth by the sea at Nepenthe on a romantic whim.

We are cherry-picking, of course, as one can on holiday, and there is plenty which is not so good in this near-bankrupt state.  Nor is California unique in its accumulation of attractive things. One cultural skill seems to elude them in this land of good taste and agricultural plenty: there is more to cooking than heaping mountains of calories on a plate and covering them with salt.

All in all, however, there has been little which falls short of perfection. I will try to write about some of it before the opening of the conference brings another wave of day-job scribbling.

There are some pictures here.

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Professor Richard Susskind was the keynote speaker at Lawtech Camp London. If his message was familiar to many of us, it bears repeating, certainly in relation to litigation, as the times catch up with his predictions. There is a good report on the Legal Futures site called “More for less”, liberalisation and technology: Susskind lays out vision of the future which leaves me free to focus on the points most relevant to litigation.

Predictors of the future, especially in a business context, are used to the reaction “That’s all very well, but what do I do now?”  They get lumped together with those who confidently predict the end of the world or environmental apocalypse – even those who accept that change must come see the threats as both far off and too big to grapple with; besides, they have businesses to run, stuff on their desks right now and calls to return. The future can wait.

Room for optimism

Well, in a litigation context, the future  predicted by Richard Susskind is here. It is by no means a future of inescapable doom – he protested mildly when I once compared him with the lugubrious Scotsman Private Fraser from Dad’s Army whose catchline was “We’re all doomed”. Richard points to the question mark at the end of the title of his book The End of Lawyers? and to his continuing emphasis on  the opportunities which are there for those who are ready to take them.  It would be fair to say that I am becoming increasingly optimistic – we have yet to see much movement from the general body of law firms, but three broad developments give tangible form to a parallel world which lawyers can either join or ignore; these are:

• The introduction of new court rules around the world which focus on the objectives of clients and courts rather than the plodding proceeding-with-the-procedures approach which has served lawyers so well in the past.
• The growing realisation by clients that the savings achieved by shaving a bit off their lawyers’ hourly rates are as nothing compared with the benefits of information governance and of taking control of at least part of the process for themselves, working with lawyers but also with others.
• Improvements not just in technology but in the services which wrap around the technology, including outsourced managed document review.

That question mark in Richard Susskind’s book title implies that those lawyers who are willing to adapt their service offerings to this new world will have new work to do including their share of new types of task. For the rest, in litigation anyway, Private Fraser has words for you. Continue reading →

Xerox’s acquisition of Lateral Data adds significantly to the range of solutions which Xerox Litigation Services can offer to its clients, and provides further evidence that the eDiscovery market is fast consolidating into fewer hands.

The announcement is here and Legal Technology News has a helpful commentary here.  The significance of this acquisition lies in the very different markets addressed by the hosted environments of Xerox Litigation Services and the in-house users for which Lateral Data’s Viewpoint was designed.  By “different markets” I do not necessarily mean that there is no overlap between the client bases of the two companies – indeed, according to LTN, Xerox  were first introduced to Lateral Data and Viewpoint by someone who was a client of both companies.

Xerox has its web-based review platform, OmniX and its document classification tool CategoriX; many clients will need these hosted services for some cases but not for others, and Lateral Data fills the gap. The plan, it seems, is to keep the two products distinct except where obvious overlaps or connections can be exploited. Randy Burroughs, managing director of XLS says: “Clients can choose a full service cloud-based approach, a do-it-yourself on premise solution or a customized combination of both.”

XLS has always emphasised that it is a services and consulting business as well as technology company. The acquisition gives ample opportunity to expand all these offerings in an enterprise eDiscovery market which Xerox estimates will grow to $1.6 billion by 2013.

I aim to see Randy Burroughs in London next week, and hope to have more behind-the-scenes information then.

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