The three-day IQPC Information Retention and eDisclosure Management Summit is over for another year. It is the biggest and best conference in the London calendar and one which genuinely aspires to do better each year. Everyone I spoke to seemed to think that it had achieved that aspiration.
I have to be careful here. I am on its advisory board and was involved in some of the planning going back to a late-night session in a Brussels hotel bar last October. I also clocked up 8 hours on its platforms this year, so I am perhaps not wholly impartial. It has the greatest concentration of people interested in e-disclosure, from judges to suppliers to lawyers to clients, and is the place to be for someone whose job involves carrying information between these players. My main interest lies in talking to people, which inevitably means that I attend few sessions beyond those in which I am involved. The loss is mine – there was a packed programme of important and interesting subjects and anyone with a stake in electronic disclosure would have benefitted from being there.
Monday was a workshop day. I took part in a three-hour session run by Legal Inc called Ready for the Regulator: the importance of equality of arms. It was led by Vince Neicho of Allen and Overy who, characteristically, had left nothing to chance in our preparation. Bill Sillett, an enforcement officer at the Financial Services Authority, had provided a scenario which was no less plausible for involving almost every aspect of an FSA investigation – what started as an apparently routine matter grew into a multi-jurisdictional one with criminal implications, SEC involvement, and a potential conflict between the company and some of its employees. Antony Montague, Associate General Counsel at McGraw Hill Companies, Matthew Davis, Litigation Support Lawyer at Hogan Lovells, Peter Cladouhos, Practice Support Electronic Discovery Consultant at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, and I brought our respective professional inputs to this scenario, with Vince as an able narrator and an audience which caught the spirit of the thing and joined in. If we ran out of time before we run out of script, that was because the audience was sufficiently involved to take us down useful byways. The main take-away for me was the confirmation that the FSA looks well on those who are both willing and able to co-operate at a data level as well as at a higher factual level. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Chris Dale 
