I was not at IQPC’s E-discovery conference in New York last week (see IQPC New York – minimizing risks, costs and challenges). Fortunately the 451 Group’s Katey Wood was there and her report is here.
Two of the points which caught Katey Wood’s eye are of particular interest. One is the session in which Deborah Baron of Autonomy interviewed Karla Wehbe of Bechtel. My article had made the point that client case studies are only interesting if they recount triumph over difficulties. This one seems to have done just that, with sceptical external lawyers now apparently onside and (a much overlooked benefit of in-house control) a proportion of reviewed documents now reusable. My spies tell me that this session was well received – not surprising, perhaps, given the article’s conclusion about “the shifting of roles between e-discovery vendors, service providers, general counsel and law firms as technology moves in-house”.
The other point of interest springs from Katey Wood’s account of the session about collection of international ESI, whose speakers included the well-regarded Denise Backhouse of Morgan Lewis. The sentence about the EU’s fundamental human right to privacy being “literally a foreign concept to those of us accustomed to living under the Patriot Act” is a good way of illustrating how much there is to do to convey to US lawyers that language is not the only thing which is foreign once you cross the Atlantic. Privacy laws and data protection need more than a check-list, as the article says. It would be a good start, however, if the subject did at least appear on the check-lists of those who need to collect data from Europe.
I have yet to see a report about the large judges’ panel at this conference. I will pass it on when I find out what was covered.
eDisclosure Information Project 