The British invade Washington again, this time to talk and learn, not burn

To say that electronic discovery is international connotes more than the cross-border ramifications of multi-jurisdictional litigation. There is commonality in the problems, the rules and the solutions, to say nothing of the implications for law firms of new ways of working. The Masters Conference was an opportunity to explore many of them.

My ambition to report on the Masters Conference in Washington before reaching the LexisNexis e-discovery conference in Singapore was defeated by various things – only so many hours in the day for one thing, and no power sockets on the planes. As I begin writing this, it is 4.00am in Singapore a week later and the conference here has been and gone.

Big reception for Marean-Dale video

Browning Marean and I made two short videos at ILTA09 with Kina Kim of PivotalDiscovery. The “big reception” in my title refers to the venue rather than the reaction, but this means of conveying information is well worth doing.

Years ago, back in the late 1980s, I attended a video presentation course with my then law firm partners. The idea was not to prepare us to appear in moving pictures but to improve our general presentation skills by showing us where we went wrong when speaking in public. My own weakness, I discovered, lay not in how I looked when being filmed, but in what I did when I was merely in the background. I realised that I fiddled constantly, scratching imaginary itches, rubbing the side of my nose and generally moving about all the time. When I first stood in front of audiences, I had to remember to remove everything from my pockets to make sure that I did not jangle keys and coins whilst speaking.

I have kicked that last one, I think, but my most recent video appearance shows up a new bad habit – continuous hand gestures like a demented weather girl signing for the deaf whilst warning of stormy weather ahead.

Nigel Murray makes it to Paris

Hands up all all those who were not convinced that Nigel Murray of Trilantic would manage the 350 miles from the Normandy Beaches to Paris. On a bicycle. In six days. Here is the photograph to prove you wrong.

Nigel Murray arrives in Paris

Back in January, I wrote rather cynically that “I did once see him run, but that was across a pavement to a cab in the rain, so barely counts as an exception to the general rule”, the general rule involving good food, beer and cigarettes. I did not doubt he would do it, though.

The cause was Help for Heroes which supports wounded servicemen. Nigel raised £5,727.87 for this good cause. The event overall has apparently raised over one million pounds.

Nigel kept a record of each day’s events, covering both the cycling and the interesting – and, I suspect, rather emotive – stops which were made at places of significance. His donations page remains open for those who want to help him get past the £6,000 mark.

Well done, Nigel.

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Compliance with the demands of an e-disclosure diary

I don’t think I envisaged a peaceful life when I decided to commit all my time to promoting electronic disclosure, but I am not sure either that I foresaw this much activity compressed into a short space. It is just as well that I enjoy it. My original policy never to say no to anything which will get an audience for the subject has had to be modified a bit – double-bookings are difficult, for one thing. Every event involves preparing slides and notes, not just turning up on the day, and the everyday stuff – researching and writing – goes by the board when there is always something happening or about to happen. I would not want it any other way but it would be good to have it better spaced. A summary will have to suffice for now, and the summer promises time to catch up.

Clyde & Co selects Epiq Systems and Trilantic as preferred e-disclosure providers

Although the business of the e-Disclosure Information Project involves telling law firms and corporations about electronic disclosure technology suppliers, I avoid discussions about pending competitive tenders in the e-disclosure market. Given the range of people with whom I am in contact, the chances of hearing twice about the same contract from rival bidders are too high and, metaphorically at least, I put my fingers in my ears if I fear I might learn more than I want to know.

No-one, however, could avoid knowing that Clyde & Co has been working to identify preferred suppliers of electronic disclosure services. It seems ages ago that I first heard about it, in a remote country pub (life is not all glossy conferences and airports, you know) and it became clear that Kevin Butterill, Clyde’s litigation support manager, was extremely keen to get it right. The tender became the Moby Dick of the e-disclosure seas, each provider his own Captain Ahab on a mission to hunt it down.

Trilantic panel explores international e-Discovery initiatives at LegalTech

Not much changes at LegalTech from year to year. Sure, the trends come and go – “the move to the left”, Twitter, and “Please look at my CV” being this year’s big things – but for the most part, the same booths, the same faces and the same routines turn up every year.

One discernible change, however, is the interest in what is happening in other jurisdictions. “Abroad” does not rank high in US consciousness. We mocked George Bush when he asked a Welsh singer which state Wales was in, but most Americans, I think, would just wonder why anyone would care which state Wales is in. Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country, but no-one seemed seriously to question whether her foreign experience – a fly-by of some US bases, a refuelling stop in Ireland and a holiday in Mexico  – was adequate for a vice-presidential candidate. In the e-discovery world, most Americans see Europe as a cross between a modest museum and a commercial colony full of obstructive civil servants obsessed with data privacy. For years, the value of the dollar and a terror of terror kept them all at home.

You do not see this until you go to the US. Most of the Americans I know well have a well-rounded world view but that, I now realise, is because I meet most of them outside the US – they self-classify themselves as people who know of the world outside America because that is where I come across them. The insular ones – including, unfortunately, those who make political and commercial policy – stay at home. This matters because the US is still the commercial powerhouse of the world – no-one in America cares, frankly, what Gordon Brown thinks about America, but it does matter what America knows, or thinks it knows, about the rest of the world.

E-Disclosure Taster Menu in Bristol

I went down to Bristol last week with a group of electronic disclosure suppliers at the invitation of the Western Chancery & Commercial Bar Association. The aim, as in Birmingham last year, was not just to talk about electronic disclosure, but to illustrate it by showing and describing a range of applications and services

Bristol used to be Britain’s second city. In the 18th Century it grew prosperous on the triangular trade which took cloth and iron goods to Africa, slaves to America and tobacco, and sugar and rum back to Bristol. In 1841 the Great Western Railway connected it to London and, in an early example of joined-up commerce, you could travel on GWR trains and GWR ships from London to New York. Its relative prosperity declined as other places boomed and as different industries – ship-building, tobacco, cotton – had their heyday and fell away. There is more industry in the region than one sees from the M4 – I flew over the Severn Estuary on my way in from New York at dawn a couple of weeks ago and noted the miles of industrial zones from Avonmouth Docks down towards Bristol.

All that industry, together with property-related work from the West – Bristol is the first place of any size as you come up from Cornwall or out of Wales – has supported the growth of a strong legal and professional services business. Every other legal magazine in the late 1980s seemed to profile Bristol. Its population of around 400,000 makes it now Britain’s tenth city preceded by London, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Bradford, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Manchester. It can take as little as 90 minutes to get to London by train.  There are some large barristers’ chambers in Bristol and one does not get the impression that work is in short supply. Bristol is one of ten cities in Britain with a Mercantile Court, that is, a court with a specialist commercial list and judge or judges ticketed to hear mercantile cases.

All very interesting you may say, but this site is meant to be an information resource on electronic disclosure, not a local history, travel guide or Chamber of Commerce directory. Indeed, but disclosure comes with litigation; litigation follows industry and business; and the ability to win commercial litigation work from any region depends on the quality of local law firms and chambers, and on their ability to stop the work from heading to London. It ought to be possible, in fact, for the combination of legal skills, good transport links and an efficient Mercantile Court not just to stem the flow to London but to reverse it. The sixty or so barristers and solicitors who turned out to listen to us presumably want to draw work into their region.

Legal Technology Awards 2009

I went to the Legal Technology Awards last night at the kind invitation of Nigel Murray of Trilantic. Nigel disappointingly, turned up in black tie and not the lycra cycling gear which we had hoped to see (read Murray to cycle across the Channel if you find this reference obscure).

Trilantic emerged as Highly Commended in the category Electronic Disclosure Support / Service Provider of the year in this, its third year of being short-listed. The category winners were Merrill Legal Solutions.

E-Disclosure Information Project first birthday

November marks the first anniversary of what became the E-Disclosure Information Project. It did not have that name when I ran a half-day training session for judges in Birmingham last November but it was effectively launched with that event. This Commentary began a year or so earlier.

That first session was made possible by generous support from forensic collections expert FoxData whose Ian Manning has continued to back what I do, by turning out to speak and with useful information and introductions as well as financially. Tyrone Edward, now at Ernst & Young Forensic Technology & Discovery Services, made the suggestion for a business model which has allowed me to spend substantially all my time on spreading information about electronic disclosure. The Project is sponsored by the companies whose logos appear here, but on the basis that it is independent and product-agnostic.

The main outputs from the e-Disclosure Information Project are what I write here and on my website, and conferences. There are 228 posts on this site. None of them are simple regurgitations of press releases – PRs are invaluable sources of hard information, but I am more interested in the context and the implications of a software or services initiative than in the bare words of a press release.

Birmingham barristers see e-disclosure applications

A seminar in Birmingham allowed an audience of lawyers to see some of the applications used to handle electronic disclosure topped and tailed by some explanation of the litigation context. It was not just a trade show but a visual way to convey that the solutions are gaining on the problem

The e-Disclosure Information Project originated in Birmingham when Mark Surguy of Pinsent Masons introduced me last summer to HHJ Simon Brown QC, a designated Mercantile Judge at the Birmingham Civil Justice Centre. We brought it back there at the beginning of October when Edward Pepperall, a commercial barrister at St Philips Chambers, arranged for the Midland Chancery & Commercial Bar Association to invite us to give a reprise of a talk he had heard us give to solicitors a few months ago.

Ed Pepperall’s reasoning was that barristers are increasingly getting involved in the procedural aspects of Case Management Conferences. Birmingham may be ahead of other places because the judges there are known to practice the “active management” which the overriding objective requires and in which the parties are expected to take their part. The Commercial Court Guide, on which the Mercantile Court Guides are based, emphasises that the CMC is not just the old summons for directions. Judge Brown says of the CMC that is a “business meeting”.

If barristers are engaged at the CMC then they need to be aware – preferably well before they go in, and not just in the corridor outside – what the court will expect them to cover. Hands up all those who know about the obligation to discuss electronic sources of documents in Paragraph 2A.2 of the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR. I thought not. What about Digicel (St Lucia) v Cable & Wireless? We did not mention that, because it had not been heard then. It has now, and we can expect many more orders requiring parties to discuss their sources and to take difficulties or disagreements to the judge.

Another Trilantic anniversary

Corporate birthdays are generally of less significance than human ones, although Anacomp is rightly making much of the fact that it has been in data storage for 40 years. In general, this is a young industry, and few companies can yet claim a decade.

I bring up the subject of Trilantic’s birthday because it seems to have been around forever and yet has just celebrated its third anniversary. MD Nigel Murray, of course, has been around for ever – I misread a press release of his recently as saying that he was a “25 year-old veteran” which seemed unlikely, if only because I have known him in the industry for what seems like most of 25 years. It was in fact “25-year veteran”.

Nigel was host at a party following on from the Legal Week Litigation Forum last week which included a good mix of those who had been at the conference and Trilantic’s own guests.

It is interesting to speculate as to who will still be with us in, say, five years’ time, and what new players will have made their mark. At ILTA in Dallas last month I saw booths bearing names which I had never heard of. One or two will break through in this expanding market; some will fizzle out quickly.

Trilantic is likely to be a stayer.

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No UK law firms at ILTA 2008

After this February’s LegalTech in New York, I wrote a piece called Why no UK lawyers at LegalTech? in which I suggested that UK law firms – partners and/or their senior IT staff – would benefit enormously from a few days in a place where almost every e-disclosure supplier and expert, including a large contingent of experienced UK litigation support managers, gather every year. There they could see demos of every application worth seeing, talk to pretty well everyone with knowledge and experience – and have a good time as well.

Foreign collections need more than big feet

You will have seen from other posts that I have been at the ILTA conference in Dallas this week. ILTA is the International Litigation Technology Association and its conference title was Global Perspective, Peer Advantage, a title conveying the theme that attendees, regardless of size or location, can gain something from adopting a global perspective and from meeting with peers.

The opening session on the litigation track was very much about global perspectives. Browning Marean of DLA Piper LLP, Nigel Murray of Trilantic and Stephen Dooley of Sullivan & Cromwell talked about international discovery exercises under the title International discovery and handling foreign language data. Two international law firms and a UK-based litigation support company with a growing US client-base made a good team to give us the global picture.

Off to Pasadena and ILTA

I am off tomorrow morning to Pasadena, coming back via Dallas where ILTA (the International Litigation Technology Association) is holding its big annual conference.

The draw in Pasadena is Guidance Software who, as I wrote in a recent post, were early sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project which I run, and who have been enthusiastic supporters ever since. This is a welcome opportunity to get to see the senior management, including CEO Victor Limongelli whom I met briefly in London last year.

ILTA is an opportunity to catch up with people with whom I correspond or speak but rarely see. There is an increasing amount of information-trading about developments in electronic discovery between those in the UK and the US, as well as Australia. The problems, and the solutions, are obviously similar. The rules and the practice are perhaps less alike in practical effect than they may appear to be. Superficial impressions of scale are misleading – big cases are big cases in all these jurisdictions, but most US lawyers litigating electronically are in small firms. What is different is the culture in which lawyers, judges, suppliers and clients work towards cost-effective solutions pro rata to all sizes of case, and cultural differences are best identified face to face.

Most of the Project’s sponsors will be there – OutIndex, Guidance Software, LexisNexis, Epiq Systems, Anacomp / CaseLogistix, Autonomy Zantaz and Trilantic – a chance to  meet the US people where generally I deal with the UK end, as well as to see others who may become sponsors. As at LegalTech in New York every February, I go with few pre-booked appointments, confident that the days will be filled with discussions which add value to what I do in the UK.

I should be able to write about it all from there, at least as a technical matter. The practice is likely to be otherwise.

If you are at ILTA and would like to know more about the e-Disclosure Information Project, do come and say Hello or send me an e-mail.

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Project sponsors ranked by Socha-Gelbmann

It is probably a grave dereliction of duty to disappear on holiday just as George Socha and Tom Gelbmann publish their annual Electronic Discovery Survey provider rankings, but that is no reflection on the performance of those of my sponsors whose names appear in it.

Anacomp, Autonomy Zantaz, Epiq Systems, Guidance Software, LexisNexis and Trilantic all appear, some of them more than once, in a survey regarded as the most objective and authoritative report on an industry whose 2007 revenues, at $2.794 billion, were up 46% from 2006.

Trilantic welcomed as Project sponsors

A warm welcome to Trilantic as the latest addition to the sponsors of the e-Disclosure Information Project. Trilantic is a legal support company focused on electronic Disclosure services, delivering a wide range of solutions to lawyers and others.

The purpose of the Project is to bring together all those with an interest in electronic disclosure, whether lawyers, judges, suppliers or the corporations whose electronic data is what it is all about. Nigel Murray is better known than most of those on the supplier side, and has done much to promote the industry.

Nigel and I started in this business at about the same time – my dedication to electronic filing allows me to date our first meeting to 15 December 1993. My welcome to Trilantic is therefore a personal one as well as being on behalf of the Project.

More will follow in due course.

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Affordable electronic disclosure pricing

I wrote last week applauding an e-disclosure services company which had launched an electronic disclosure service at a relatively low fixed price per Gb (see e-Disclosure pricing not just for large matters). It appeared that they had told everyone but me about it, which seemed a bit odd given that I am known to be keen to promote the fact that electronic handing of electronic data is not as expensive as it is assumed to be.

I wrote a story about it anyway, if a post without any actual facts in it can be called a story, and it got nearly 50 hits in a couple of days (that, I should tell you, is not at all bad for what remains a niche interest). One of those was obviously the company concerned, who wrote at once to say that the mailing list had gone awry for all the press contacts and that it was not just me who had been left in the dark.

E-Disclosure conferences give plenty to think about

Those who expect a daily addition to this collection of notes and essays (and I know there are a few such) may have wondered if I have run out of things to say from the paucity of posts recently.

Far from it, but I have been preparing for or attending three conferences this week, each of which has generated more than enough potential copy without leaving time to write it. What follows is a taster which I will follow over the next few days with more detailed reports.

At the Lawyer conference E-Disclosure – Beyond the Rules, I spoke with HHJ Simon Brown QC on the Commercial Court Recommendations and what the courts expect from you. We picked out the parts and the principles which apply to disclosure, and emphasised that everything we talked about applied as much in other courts as in the Commercial Court in cases where the volumes of documents made it proportionate.

If I had known the cost was hundreds not thousands….

The reactions at an e-disclosure conference point up the value of getting an idea of the likely costs before deciding that electronic disclosure is not for you. You cannot assess proportionality without doing so, and may be surprised by the answer.

On my first slide at an all-day seminar for CLT Conferences this week, I had a quotation from the Commercial Court Recommendations.

“Automatic disclosure will not take place until after the CMC, which decides on the scope of disclosure” [Para 68a]

One of the delegates immediately asked “Is this just about the Commercial Court then?”, putting his finger straight onto the central difficulty in trying to raise understanding about electronic disclosure, even with an audience which self-selected as wanting to know about the subject.

No, it is most certainly not just about the Commercial Court, nor only about big litigation between big, technically-skilled firms. Indeed, the implied assumption that “big” and “technically-skilled” go together highlights another point here – there are many big firms who have no idea about electronic disclosure, and plenty of smaller firms who do.

Summation thought-leadership

As I have already mentioned, Summation is back in the UK and aiming for a share of the growing market here.

Since I don’t actually sell software solutions, my interest in “the market” is driven by the underlying causes of market growth rather than by the turnover for its own sake. The business success of the various players is an objective measure of the progress which is being made towards encouraging lawyers and their clients to handle electronic documents electronically – a progress which is the objective function of the e-Disclosure Information Project.

Wolters Kluwer, who now own CT Summation, are organising a series of Thought Leadership seminars and have one coming up on 20 May called E-Disclosure Primer for In-House and External Counsel. It is being led by Nigel Murray of Trilantic and by me. The chosen topic is the increasingly significant one of responsibility – responsibility, that is, to clients, courts and shareholders.

Networking thoughts after LegalTech

The LegalTech cud is still being chewed. The graph below show page views on this blog down to today, with an encouraging upward trend. The actual visits are not huge in absolute terms – 163 page views on one day last week is the record – but interest seems to be growing in what has been a minority activity in the UK.

That, incidentally, is the point of publishing the graph – we do not have many pointers as to how many people want to know about the subject. We know that many suppliers seem busy enough, but there is no composite figure for that. The readership of a single-issue web site gives us some feel for the level of interest.

The aim, of course, is to make this a mainstream activity for anyone who litigates here with any volume of electronic data, and the blog is only one of the initiatives which are in hand. There are a number of conferences planned in which I am involved in various capacities – as co-chair, facilitator, speaker or writer. There is bigger emphasis on the UK perspective in this year’s London-based international programmes, quite apart from those which focus exclusively on the CPR. I am happy to field any interest in these conferences and to point you in the right direction for whatever your interests are.

Trilantic sessions round off LegalTech

As in previous years, Trilantic organised three sessions for the last day of LegalTech. They are generally less formal than the other sessions and, as I have said elsewhere, take important subjects with a light tone.

I thought I would summarise what was said, but cannot in fact do so because I got an e-mail a few minutes into the first one, offering an opportunity to see someone whom I very much wanted to meet. My account of the sessions will necessarily be light on content.

The first one was called International eDiscovery Rules, Standards and Challenges. The Moderator was George Socha and the panelists were Browning Marean of DLA Piper, Laura Kibbe of Pfizer, Vince Neicho of Allen & Overy and Michelle Mahoney of Mallesons Stephen Jaques.

Trilantic delivers Translation Services

Trilantic has launched Trilantic Translation Services (TTS) which, they say, is the first translation service which uses the accuracy of human translation with the power of technology.

TTS is described as a robust, highly effective, fast translation service [which] is considerably more accurate than any of the automated and Web based tools currently available. The key ingredient is a case-specific translation dictionary which is built up when the foreign-language documents are loaded into the system.

Trilantic say that the average human translator can handle about 2,500 words per day, making this stage a time-consuming and expensive one – especially as it is done across the whole document population, before culling has removed those which are irrelevant. TTS can translate at the rate of 6,000 pages per hour, which means that the inclusion of a high proportion of foreign-language documents need not delay the lawyer review.

Key documents can be manually translated later if that is required for admissibility.

For more information, contact Nigel Murray nigel.murray@trilantic.co.uk at Trilantic on +44 20 7042 1000

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Trilantic sets out EU Data Protection Rules

The EU Data Protection Rules – Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council – On the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data to give its snappy full name – are the usual bureaucrats’ quagmire, giving the impression that their primary purpose is to provide job opportunities for Belgian civil servants.

Whatever we may think of them, we cannot avoid them, and those who work in this area must tread carefully. A thank-you, therefore, to Trilantic, who have summarised them all, with links to each country from a clickable map, and to the text of the relevant Articles. They prudently accompany it with a Disclaimer.

The guide can be found here.

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Legal Technology Awards 2008

The Legal Technology Awards 2008 happened five days and an ocean away – two oceans, in fact, one called the Atlantic and one poured from various bottles on both sides of the Atlantic. Both time and tide mean that my recollections are necessarily hazy, so if you want an authoritative account of who won what, I suggest you go to the LTA’s own site.

Waiting for the Oxford bus at the top of Park Lane at 2:00am on the first morning of February is a sobering experience. Just as well really. Nigel Murray of Trilantic, whose guest I was, had pressed the first glass of champagne into my hand at 6:15 the previous evening. I drained the last at 01:30. In between came dinner (rather better than one expects on these occasions), the awards themselves, and several hours of shouted conversation in a crowded bar.

T3 – Trial Tactics and Technology in London

A mock eDiscovery hearing yesterday in front of real judges would have put UK litigation lawyers on notice of rough rides ahead if they are less than fully prepared to justify what has been done or not done to control the time and expense of Discovery. Where was the audience?

I have never been to a legal technology conference where they have to hold the crowds back with ropes. That, however, was the scene which greeted me as I approached the New Connaught Rooms in London yesterday for ALM Events’ show T3 Trial Tactics & Technology.

It turned out to be a double-booking – all those podgy girls in black tights and the skinny youths clutching musical instruments were there for the first auditions of Britain’s Got Talent. Perhaps Simon Cowell or Ant and Dec would pop up and give their view on the talent on the next floor, where ALM had gathered a large crowd of experts from both sides of the Atlantic under the title Confronting litigation and globalization of your data.

TRILANTIC cited as a top eDiscovery provider

A coup for Nigel Murray and TRILANTIC as ILTA opens in Orlando. Trilantic was named as a Top 20 eDiscovery provider based on Law Firm recognition. In addition, they were cited as a Top 10 provider in the (trial) presentation category.

The ranking comes in the influential 2007 Socha-Gelbmann 5th Annual Electronic Discovery Survey from Socha Consulting and Gelbmann & Associates. Trilantic is the only non-US provider to get a ranking, reflecting both the increase in cases which have a European or UK dimension as well as Trilantic’s increasing involvement on both sides of the Atlantic.

Business and pleasure mix at Trilantic party

To Broadgate last night for Trilantic’s last Third Thursday party, although by the time I got home it felt as if it had been last Thursday’s third party. Nigel Murray’s parties tend to leave one feeling as if one has been drinking and eating well all day.