Monica Bay, LTN magazine editor-in-chief
Photo: M. Soladay
Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
Image: Rick Kopstein
Planes, trains, automobiles, and even boats are bringing the e-discovery aficionados to Arlington, Va., for a two-day "Advanced eDiscovery Institute." The sold-out conference, which starts Thursday at 8:15 a.m. at the Ritz-Carlton, uses a huge magnet to lure litigation professionals: It has become the judge-a-palooza of electronic data discovery.
The Georgetown team has figured out a clever way to keep everybody arriving on time, and not daring to depart early (quite a feat considering that the program wraps up close to 5 p.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving, when so many professionals dash off to family vacations). How do they do it? They kick off the program with judges and end the program with judges.
And not just any jurists -- Georgetown Law gets the "posse": the most influential judges currently defining the two most volatile topics within the whole shebang of EDD: preservation and predictive coding (aka computer-assisted coding.) Yes, we're talking about New York's Shira Scheindlin, Andrew Peck, and James Francis; Baltimore's Paul Grimm; Texas' Lee Rosenthal; D.C.'s John Facciola; and Kansas' David Waxse -- just to name a few. The above-named folks jump-start the conference with an update of EDD case law, and then an even larger group of judges wraps up the event, as it does every year, with an open-agenda "round-up" on Friday afternoon.
Many of the jurists appear on panels throughout the conference, on various topics, including state approaches to EDD, cloud computing and social media, "Pragmatic Practices for Resolving e-Discovery Cross-Border Conundrums," and statistics and sampling. There are a few jurist-free panels, including EDD in investigations and litigation before federal agencies; best practices for EDD project management; the "business" of EDD; and corporate policies.
Is change in the wind? The current posse of judges has definitely been front-and-center for the last several years as EDD pioneers, particularly on the difficult and controversial issues surrounding preservation of electronically stored information, spoliation, and cooperation (including "meet and confer" requirements). But over the last few months, some new faces have been emerging -- most notably, Texas' Randall Rader, who has been shaking up the patent community with his proposed model e-discovery order developed by the Federal Circult Advisory Council's EDD committee; and New York's James Cott, who has been getting attention for his recent decision in Pippins v. KPMG declining to apply proportionality principles in a potential class action suit against the audit and tax consulting company.
In our February issue of Law Technology News (distributed at LegalTech New York), Littler's Cecil Lynn III will analyze the most important EDD cases of 2011. Here's an interesting sneak preview of one interesting trend: You'll see many perhaps-unfamiliar judges' names. Whether this will signal that EDD is truly going mainstream, or that some new stars are emerging -- or both -- is yet to be seen.
Watch for reports by the LTN team from Georgetown over the next couple of days. Conference materials will be available for those who can't attend; see the Georgetown University Law Center website's event page.
Monica Bay is editor-in-chief of Law Technology News magazine, and a member of the California bar. Send e-mail.
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