I recently attended The Information Retention and eDiscovery Exchange in Munich, Germany. I found it to be an interesting mix of EU and US corporate counsel and eDiscovery experts. The focus was on in-house counsel and how they deal with the ever-expanding data sets involved in litigation today. The conference took a hard look at how groups from the US and EU approach ESI and their differing perspectives on the importance of managing large data sets.
Many of the corporations that spoke focused on how they have set-up internal groups to manage and support their legal teams in their discovery needs. It was clear that each of these groups are taking a more proactive approach to managing their data sets to not only assist the legal teams, but to lower data processing and document review costs.
Of the many panels, the most interesting to me was the Judges Panel: The View From The Bench which included:
- Judge Dr. Gabriella Muscolo, from Rome
- Judge Simon Brown, QC Specialist Mercantile Judge Birmingham Civil Justice Centre
- Judge David Waxse, United States District Court Kansas City; and
- Judge Herbert Dixon, Superior Court of DC
My impression? The Judges believe that (1) Clients need to have more control of their litigation, (2) Outside counsel must be more proactive in understanding their clients’ ESI, (3) There is too much over-preservation and (4) Lawyers need to be better prepared to cooperate with the other side in the litigation on ESI requirements.
Judge Brown was especially interesting, and his approach to discovery was refreshing. He is a very astute and knowledgeable jurist to the point where he will question counsel on their ESI if he feels they did not provide enough information.
This Judges Panel dovetailed perfectly with my panel. We discussed how new technologies impact the need to reduce to the amount of data to review and present in a litigation. My fellow panelists were:
- Mr. Eric Laurent-Ricard, Chief Forensic Expert Paris Court of Appeal
- Mr. Jon Tilbury, Director Tessella plc
- Mr. Andrew Sieja, CEO of kCura Corporation
- Mr. Mark Yacano, EVP of Hudson Legal was the Moderator
We discussed how advanced searching affects data sets; the need for better information governance; and more focused collection all affect the outcome of a litigation. My particular focus was on how the legal team addresses the over-abundance of data and how they need to better manage this data.
I stressed that the legal team (both in-house and outside counsel) need to do a better job of including professionals within the corporation that understand the data. Specifically, the information technology groups; records management group and business owners need to be more involved, since they are the ones that use and manage the data that has been preserved, collected and processed for a litigation.
These groups need to be an integral part of a litigation team especially as judges want to know more about the actual data – how is it stored – where is it stored – was it collected properly – and how was it processed and produced. Without this knowledge, a litigation plan will be flawed and questions will be raised that could compromise the overall decision in a case.
It is clear that conferences such as these are important so that everyone involved in the process understands that the legal team is composed of more than lawyers.
