Date :
Thursday, November 15, 2012
9:00 AM – 5:00 PM

In searching in this blog for past events that I’ve attended, most of the links and contents have changed and/or disappeared!

Here’s the agenda:
8.30
REGISTRATION AND COFFEE
9.00
CHAIR’S INTRODUCTION AND CONFERENCE OUTLINE
Chris Dale, The eDisclosure Information Project

A brief overview of the rules and cases used to challenge the conventional view
• Goodale: if the court can make any order, you can seek any order
• The pending Rule 31.5 to encourage active judicial decision-making
• How can you persuade your opponent and the judge to your point of view?

9.20
THE QUESTIONNAIRE/PRACTICE DIRECTION/GOODALE
Moderator: Chris Dale, The eDisclosure Information Project
Panellists: Vince Neicho, Litigation Support Manager, Allenn & Overy LLP
Senior Master Steven Whitaker, Senior Master of the Supreme Court of England and Wales in the Queen’s Bench Division, the Queen’s Remembrancer and a former barrister
Kate Paslin, Associate General Counsel – International, AccessData Group

The Questionnaire
• When do you need to complete the Questionnaire?
• What value does it have, even where it does not necessarily apply?
• How do you gather the information early, without incurring significant time and expense?
The Practice Direction
• When does the Practice Direction apply?
• What obligations arise for discussion and cooperation?
Goodale
• This session will assist you in deciding what you really need on your own side and developing the arguments which support any derogations from the stringent obligations under Rule 31.6.

10.30
NETWORKING AND REFRESHMENTS BREAK
11.00
COSTS AND TECHNOLOGY
Moderator: George Socha, President, Socha Consulting LLC
Panellists: Browning Marean, Senior Counsel, DLA Piper US LLP
Dominic Regan, Professor, City University of London
Johannes Scholtes, CSG, ZyLAB
Drew Macaulay, Director, First Advantage Litigation Consulting

Costs
• Costs estimates: how to gather the information and
estimates
• Identifying the certainties and uncertainties
Technology
• What are clustering, email threading, and predictive
coding?
• What do these tools do and what are their strengths
and limitations?

12.15
NETWORKING LUNCH
13.30
HOW SHOULD YOUR LAW FIRM STRUCTURE ITS eDISCLOSURE TEAM?
Moderator: Browning Marean, Senior Counsel, DLA Piper US LLP
Panellists: Vince Neicho, Litigation Support Manager, Allenn & Overy LLP
George Socha, President, Socha Consulting LLC
Matthew Davis, Litigation Support Lawyer, Hogan Lovells International LLP
Robert Lewis MBE, Global Director, Barclays CFI/ eDiscovery
David Kemp, Autonomy

Competition: Not just outsourcers, but also clients, consulting firms, and barristers
• Outsourcing:
1. Processing: how do you deal with the processing of ESI? Should you outsource it? If so, when?
2. Document review: what are you outsourcing? What role will your law firm play on an “outsourced” review?
• Staffing: What sort of people would best manage eDisclosure in a law firm or in-house department? How do you find the most appropriate staff, train them, and then learn from them?

14.45
NETWORKING AND REFRESHMENTS BREAK
15.15
OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES OF PRESERVATION AND COLLECTION
Moderator: Vince Neicho, Litigation Support Manager, Allenn & Overy LLP
Panellists: Browning Marean, Senior Counsel, DLA Piper US LLP
George Socha, President, Socha Consulting LLC
Mark Surguy, Legal Director, Dispute Resolution & Litigation Group, Eversheds
Senior Master Steven Whitaker, Senior Master of the Supreme Court of England and Wales in the Queen’s Bench Division, the Queen’s Remembrancer and a former barrister

Preservation
• What are the obligations in a jurisdiction which lacks the US formal concept of legal hold?
• What are the implications of Judge Brown’s statement in Earles v Barclays Bank to the effect that companies who expect litigation must be ready for it and should have the tools and processes to manage it?
• What does the warning in Paragraph 7 of the PD (to advise your clients to stop deletion) really mean?
• How do you keep alert to the Rybak-type situation where your client or his opponent may have deleted data deliberately?
Collection
• Considerations: How? How much? Where from? With what resources? By whom?
• What are the implications of over- or undercollecting?
• Who needs to talk to whom and with what agenda?

16.30
CHAIR’S CLOSING REMARKS AND RECAP

Symantec’s survey : Information Retention and eDiscovery Survey (international coverage)

Can’t locate the Year Review from Kroll Ontrack Inc. Notes at Businesswire.com
and at continuitycompliance.org (US coverage)

Fulbright’s litigation trend (US & UK)

Does this mean that Cloud Computing is now passé?

To quote Paknad in the news at law.com: “There’s no easy button, there’s just complex and more complex buttons.”

Complex buttons leading to more sore fingers and eyes ( even with predictive coding! ).

Here is my (initial) comment posted at the legalprojectmanagement blog :
Ah! Interesting picture of the EPMF. My first question is why do we need a PM framework for ediscovery? What is/are missing from existing PM models/frameworks/methodologies?

I like Paul’s comment ‘the Project Manager may find herself also wearing the hat of Peace Maker’. Perhaps instead of PM for ediscovery, we introduce a new term PM for Peace Maker

Personally, I will opt for a light-weight methodology (based on my own experiences) for managing ediscovery activities. Since I am a non believer in any PM stuff for understanding and/or managing the dynamic interactions between the various stakeholders, I will just be ME and learn how I engage with others and take it from there.So understanding ME is the first step.

It would be great if we can prescribe a model to model the various ‘formed’ opinions/behaviours/perspectives of the people involved in the activities. These are the stuff which makes or breaks projects, right? I am not looking for such a model as human will trump model/process simply because we have model for this/that and for people to act on. Hence we have risk management to manage risks which we can identify and anything else not identifiable we say ‘Acts of God’ or human folly or ingenuity.

Thanks for sharing!
Cher

When I said ‘old’ it’s over 20+ years aged Sony TV. Still working fine except the remote sensor is not working. Anyhow I cancelled my TV licence yesterday via e-mail and wasn’t too sure what I need to do to ‘disconnect’ my set. Phew! I am glad it’s a simple disconnect of cables from my set (to ‘show’ that I won’t be using my TV for recording or receiving programmes). Amazing…it’s not something I imagine doing i.e. disconnecting my TV…sounds rather weird in this age of gadgets and the likes.

Maybe soon the ‘TV’ set (like my ‘old’ TV) will be revamped or re-classified to be something else to cater for the ‘digital TV’. Will TV still be ‘TV’ and not ‘HD TV or digital TV or something TV’?

Classification sounds easy but is it?

In ediscovery/edisclosure, searching for ESI assumes that the data has a hook or a ‘name’ or being indexed or classified to denote the nature of the ‘data’. As the nature of ‘data’ changes and also the storage of it or the gadgets that hold it changes, classification requires far more imagination than simply throwing out the ‘old’ ( like me cancelling my TV licence via e-mail. Oh! the physical cancellation paper to follow ).

Beyond my TV room, apparently there’s an ongoing trade dispute due to ‘old’ or outdated Informational Technology Agreement (ITA) whereby the ITA is obsolete due to problems with classification of new multifunctional digital devices (like the new digital TV). For old and still relevant news, do check out the report at egov. A pretty long winded article to report on a problem with classification of digital devices, not easy eh?

Will classification of data or ESI become a matter of dispute in the ediscovery space? So far, from the list supplied by Kroll Ontrack Inc. in their ‘Year In Review’ report (the US ediscovery landscape), classification issue is not on their top charts (yet).

I suspect the majority of blog readers/subscribers are aware that the platforms in the clouds such as facebook (e.g. the landmark case in Australia) and twitter (big companies using this to connect and tweet with their customers) are sources of ESI. As mobile technology gets more integrated with these clouds of information the ‘Future Year in Review’ list (like the list compiled by Kroll Ontrack Inc.) will not just be ‘process-oriented’ but also ‘platform-oriented’ or rather infrastructure related. No doubt the question of classification will emerge with the discoverable or reasonably accessible issues like the disputes around the obsolete ITA. It will be tweets against search criteria or algorithm. Now the 140 characters tweets or twitters are surely more accessible than the zillion of e-mails, right? Well…like I say classification sounds easy…

I will invade the twitter dome this year for some fun.

The above legal article also mentioned the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) 2006 study which was also examined by Will Uppington in the article, Better Search for E-Discovery, March 11th, 2008

What I find interesting in Will Uppington’s article is the finding; ‘One of the best ways to get better search queries is to commit human resources to improving them, by putting a “human-in-the-loop” while performing searches’.

Reading in between these two ‘search themed’ titles, one from the legal side and the other from a technical perspective, highlighted the contrasting findings and interpretation on the TREC 2006 study

What else can we say/talk about the ‘human-in-the loop’, the ‘virtuous cycle of iterative feedback’ & “interactive” search methodology?

Well such phrases/concepts are not new. What is new is that the ‘human actions’ aspects are creeping (awareness?) into the ediscovery space. Other knowledge researchers outside the ediscovery domain have been busily coming up with phrases/concepts such as the ‘concept searching’ methodologies. Reality (or inertia adoption) testing of such newer technologies are clearly not well understood (too good to be true?) by the courts and practitioners.

On human actions and computer programs, a beautiful quote comes from my friend, Roger C: “While computer programs can write other computer programs, they can’t write the first program”.

To that I will add: An expert is only effective in the human-in-the-loop search if the expert is also an expert in the codes

If you’re curious on how a Solution Provider ‘makes sense in plain English of the FRCP, scan the posted white paper.

I cannot comment on the MessageOne solution as I have not used or been exposed to the product.

However in the white paper there is a statement ‘Data is never lost, and companies have robust search and retrieval functionality to meet the legal and compliance challenges facing all industries, today.’

‘Data is NEVER lost’? This is a myth with or without an archive system.

It’s so easy to forget that once e-mail is sent /delivered (a copy may reside on your sent folder/archive), the information/data is also OUT of reach of the sender. Another food for though – how to make sense of the clawback agreements for e-mails?