“We have been travelling since we saw you last. We have been in America, entertaining the Americans whose need, let’s face it, is greater even than yours. Of course when we’re over there we say that the other way round”
That is how Michael Flanders opened Flanders & Swann’s second selection of comic songs At the Drop of Another Hat in London in 1963. They seem successfully to have crossed the Atlantic divide despite a style which was rooted so firmly in English traditions of education and culture that it more or less excluded the Welsh, Irish and Scotch; the verses to their Song of Patriotic Prejudice – “The English are best” (lyrics and video) would today bring complaints from some humourless official who would investigate it as incitement to racial hatred and arrange a compulsory diversity course. Fashions change in these things – has Hollywood at last given up casting a well-spoken Englishman as the villain in every film? The devolution of powers within the UK, the subservience to Europe which culminated in the Treaty of Lisbon, and Blair’s shameful grovelling to Bush have left us without influence in areas which we used to dominate. Perhaps that is why I am so keen that we should be heard in my own field.
I am just back from Washington, where Master Whitaker and I flew the English and Welsh (but not Scottish or Irish) edisclosure/ediscovery flag at the Masters Conference. We were joined by an Australian judge, Justice Einstein, of the Commercial List in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. I am not sure that anyone in the US would have been interested two or three years ago. Before then, as I said in opening my International Judicial Panel, US judges would come to London to tell us, in a rather de haut en bas way, how we should be handling electronic discovery, and English lawyers and judges reacted by disdaining the whole subject. The tide turned with a judicial panel which I organised with Guidance Software in 2008, when we put Judge Grimm and Judge Facciola from the US on a panel with Master Whitaker and HHJ Simon Brown QC from the UK. Since then, we have tapped into and shared not just each other’s thinking, but the developments in other common law jurisdictions; bringing Justice Einstein from Australia to a US platform marked a further step towards pooling judicial thought on this shared problem.
The Masters Conference has grown over the same period to be a very good forum for just this level of thinking. It is big enough to attract a good range of speakers, delegates and sponsors; it is thoughtful without being overbearingly intellectual; the mix of law, technology and practicality is about right; it recognises the importance of local interests without forgetting that there is a wider world out there which is important to US interests both as a market and as a source of ideas.
I give a brief account of the sessions which I attended – I usually do separate posts about individual sessions, but there were thematic links running through them which then would be lost. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Chris Dale 
