Photograph courtesy of Levin College of Law, Univ. of Fla.
The second annual E-Discovery Conference at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law, held March 14 in Gainesville, Florida, came none too soon after this year’s non-stop winter. The lush, green campus and mild temps were a perfect antidote to snow—and the Levin Advocacy Center's modern venue was right-sized for this nascent conference.
The day-long conference's focus was “Telling The Story”—a refreshing agenda after the year's countless programs and panels across the globe that focused on predictive coding. It was a welcome chance to talk about the tasks that litigation teams typically perform, not just the onerous, budget-busting review efforts that usually dominate program agendas.
The conference was presented by UF and the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM.net), and hosted by two "brand-name" electronic data discovery attorneys. Tampa-based William Hamilton is a man who wears many hats. At Quarles & Brady, he serves as the firm's national e-discovery partner. Passionate about education, he serves not only as executive director of UF's E-Discovery Project, but teaches E-Discovery and Digital Evidence as an adjunct professor at the school. He also serves as the dean of graduate students at Bryan University, and of its E-Discovery Project Management certificate program. George Socha, principal of Socha Consulting in St. Paul, is the co-founder of EDRM.
The event, which kicked off with an 8 a.m. breakfast, was attended by national e-discovery experts, local practitioners and University of Florida law students, as well as, a large audience of remote attendees.
Having just moved to central Florida, it was a great opportunity to check out my new neighborhood's e-discovery community, and to participate in discussions dedicated to “getting it done.” The panels fostered discussions about—and demonstrations of—current analytical tools that speed all phases of discovery by helping legal teams gain a true understanding of the case.
The program was framed around product demonstrations. Normally, I am not a fan of public software demos. They are often pitched to the unsophisticated user and show features from a software point of view, not a business use case. And I’m not usually up for looking at multiple products in one day; but these demos were interesting. They were un-canned and ad lib in order to relate to issues raised by panel participants and questions asked by attendees. Because they were stacked one on top of the other, it made for an enlightening comparison—and review of how each might be deployed during a particular phase of discovery.
The day started with a strong introduction with the cheeky title, "It's the Story, Stupid!" that focused on drilling into the data to locate trends and patterns. Hamilton and Socha queried Rene Laurens, product specialist for Relativity Software, as he test drove its kCura product.
Michael Quartararo of Strook & Strook & Lavan lead the panel on collection which included a demo of Pinpoint Harvester. The message was clear: Begin crafting a story and use it to target the collection. Hopefully, as technology gains ground, litigators will feel more empowered to collect only what is truly potentially responsive, negating the need for wholesale harvesting and mammoth document reviews.
In a panel discussion, "Lock at Data Now: Test the Story," Julie Brown, litigation technology executive manager at Vorys, Sater, Seymour & Pease and veteran EDRM contributor showed the audience how to dive under the hood to identify gaps in collections, unearth themes, and get a jump on volume reduction before review. The demo was Nuix' eDiscovery suite. I hadn’t looked at Nuix in at least a year and it was helpful to get current on its ever-expanding bevy of tools and features.
The social media segment was not as an after-thought or just the flavor of the month. JudgeElizabeth Schwabedissen, a Florida General Magistrate, provided an up-to-the minute review of case law related to appropriate interaction with social media data and custodians. Nextpoint’s cloudpreservation was an apt example of how organizations are grappling with preserving and collecting data that was, until recently, considered too ephemeral to warrant information governance or litigation hold.
