Illuminating eDiscovery

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the largest ever ILTACON, the annual meeting of the International Legal Technology Association. While many noteworthy topics were discussed as the creative juices flowed among the best and brightest of the legal IT world, below are the top five buzzworthy themes that stood out after attending (and tweeting about) dozens of sessions.

This week, I will be participating in a panel at the Corporate Counsel Forum 2018 to discuss how to transform the data privacy agenda into a trust-based agenda. My esteemed fellow speakers include representatives of Microsoft and Google, two of the largest players in the big data market. The audience will consist mainly of General Counsel representing organisations who are similarly frustrated by issues pertaining to ease of access with regard to their data. Data privacy is merely one more example of the issues exasperating effective data...

Last month I went to a conference about the impact of the December 2015 FRCP proportionality amendments. The group included plaintiffs’ and defense counsel, in-house lawyers, and service providers. On the question of real-world change, plaintiffs’ counsel reported that so far their worries about undue limits on discovery haven’t materialized. Consistent with that experience, defense counsel said they haven’t yet seen the hoped-for benefits from the amendments. Part of the reason seems to be that many practitioners either don’t know about...

Until fairly recently, “value” wasn’t really a stated goal of ediscovery. eDiscovery was just an unavoidable expense. Document production was unrelated to the larger goals or substantive work of the litigation. The idea was simply to meet obligations as cheaply as possible, usually by negotiating for the lowest rate for each line item.

A few weeks ago, along with my Lighthouse colleague Brandon Jessup, Executive Director of Technical Project Management, I spoke at the Washington Association of Corporate Counsel’s fifth annual Technology Summit. Together, we presented a session entitled Metrics that Matter – Understanding Benchmarks of Success and How to Measure Them. In the session, we discussed various measures of success in ediscovery. Since cost containment is always an important factor, we covered some practical tips below: