Jackson Lewis partner Ralph Losey, of Orlando, Fla., also supports the concept. "I'm all in favor of these quality control standards as things that should be followed by vendors. ... ISO is something that can be imposed on vendors to help make sure we're getting the same thing," he said.
"I find it fascinating," Symantec e-discovery attorney Phil Favro said, in Mountain View, Calif. "I think that anything that can get cross-border standards on e-discovery is a good thing, and that having an international body with collaboration from key players in the industry establishing those standards will go a long way, hopefully, to addressing the misunderstandings that exist between different countries."
"ISO, let's face it, they're setting the standards across the board," Favro said. "I don't see this as anything but a value-add."
At HP, in Palo Alto, Calif., standards specialist Eva Kuiper was enthusiastic. "[It] is good for the industry overall to be discussing a global ISO standard on the technical aspects of e-discovery. HP will be reviewing the standard and providing comments as it progresses," she said.
Yet many supporters hedge their bets. Losey, who writes the e-Discovery Team blog, said a standard is useful if Hibbard's team avoids areas of law: "I'm very much a believer in engineering and technology people working with lawyers," he said. But, he quipped, "I do not want to have Captain Kirk in the engineering room, and I do not want Scotty running the bridge."
Barnett noted that a standard could become too wide to manage, and Favro observed potential overlap with existing work from the Sedona Conference think tank.
Concerns and next steps
Industry consultants George Socha, known for his work on the Electronic Discovery Reference Model, and Karl Schieneman, of Review Less, both agreed that a standard could help, yet wondered aloud if it's ahead of its time.
"Our field would benefit from well-designed standards, as the status quo is far from sufficient. That said, e-discovery is a rapidly changing space—and we are talking about litigation, which by definition involves adversaries," said Socha, based in St. Paul, Minn. "That means, I suspect, that no one is going to be able to come up with any comprehensive e-discovery standards in the near future whose use will ensure that a litigant will be able to successfully argue, 'We used XYZ-standard vendor, so there's nothing to argue about,'" he said.
Socha continued, "If the approaches used to develop ISO standards help improve the quality of work performed under the broad umbrella of e-discovery then that should be a positive thing. Just as no one person or organization has the exclusive franchise for thought-leadership in the e-discovery space, no one standard-setting body has that franchise when it comes to efforts to develop standards for the e-discovery arena. Rather, I suspect that what will be the most beneficial for the largest number of e-discovery consumers and providers would be an approach whereby multiple standard-setting bodies were able to work together toward a common goal."
Schieneman had a similar response. "Obviously international e-discovery is a growing problem. But the tension with standardizing processes requires you to know which processes you want to standardize. You need to know what works. The big issue right now is experimentation," he said, in Pittsburgh. "Predictive coding, cloud computing, bring-your-own-device, social networking—there are lots of problems that are out there. These data forms keep changing," noted Schieneman. "So I think having an international committee is not a bad thing to try to deal with these issues, but the bigger challenge is trying different approaches to figure out what works."
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