IQPC Brussels Focus: Chris Dale and the e-Disclosure Information Project

One of the rock stars of the IQPC conference in Brussels in Brussels last week was Chris Dale, founder of the E-Disclosure Information Project.  He was on 3 panels at the conference and for his delightful description of the 2-day proceedings click here.   It was great to finally meet Chris.  We have emailed and Tweeted but we had never met.

Chris Dale is a former commercial litigation partner turned e-Disclosure consultant.  What he has done with the Project is to bring together lawyers, suppliers, courts and corporations with an interest in electronic disclosure, and to disseminate information about the court rules, the problems and the software and services available to handle them.

It is a full-time occupation.  It has no clients and is supported by the sponsorship of the companies whose logos appear on his site, plus fees earned from training and education and from very occasional related consultancy services.  The result: Chris’ prodigious blog posts and writings giving him a preeminent position in the field.

The Project had an interesting start, and Chris has a fascinating background.  After leaving Oxford University, he qualified as a solicitor in 1980 and has worked as a consultant and developer in litigation support since 1993.  His work has been built upon 4 competencies:

* knowing the rules and practices of UK civil law

* knowing the burgeoning area of UK e-disclosure

* a passion for writing

* an interest in what  influences people

In 2007, all of this came together.  He had started his blog that year and had met Mark Surguy of Pinsent Masons, a Birmingham law firm, at a London IQPC e-Disclosure conference. Surguy invited Chris to speak to the Mercantile Court User Group at the Birmingham Civil Justice Centre, with the bait that the court had a new judge whose goal was “to create an efficient court that people wanted to litigate in”.  That judge was HHJ Simon Brown QC who has become  well-known for his case management of electronic disclosure in the context of the UK Civil Procedure Rules.  Note:  Chris often writes and speaks about these issues in tandem with Judge Brown.

As things developed, Chris began to write more and more — which is compelling but doesn’t pay the mortgage.  At that point he met Ian Manning (then with FoxData Ltd, now with Raposa Consulting, one of  the UK’s leading computer forensics, data recovery companies).  Manning offered to sponsor Chris’s work . 

And with that, Chris had his first sponsor and he was off to the races.  The e-Disclosure Information Project has become a full-time occupation and is supported by the sponsorship of the companies whose logos appear on his blog, a list of sterling companies and an impressive testimony to his stature in the e-disclosure field.

Chris has become a definitive authority on UK and European e-disclosure and his blog is read far and wide.  He has been a featured speaker or panelist at numerous e-disclosure conferences and events including LegalTech in New York, CEIC in Orlando, Ark Group in London and Sydney as well as IQPC’s well-known May London conference. (click here for a backlist of those conferences and events).

And he is credited by many in the e-discovery  world with organizing the best judges’ panel e-discovery we’ve ever seen at the May 2009 “IQPC Information Retention and E-Discovery Management Conference” in London:  the two leading US and the two leading UK e-discovery judges discussing developments in the two jurisdictions.  For full analysis of that event see Chris’ post click here.

Next:  his upcoming participation at the Masters Conference in Washington, DC on October 13^th and 14^th (click here) where the All-Star-Cast of judges cited above reconvenes, followed by the LexisNexis E-Discovery & Digital Forensics Conference in Singapore on October 21st and 22nd (click here).

But the “crown jewel” is the Thompson Reuters 5^th Annual E-Disclosure Forum in London on November 13^th  (click here) which brings him together (again) with e-discovery luminaries George Socha and Browning Marean, plus HHJ Simon Brown, Senior Master Whitaker, Ian Montague of Pfizer, and others .  It is the most comprehensive one-day conference on cross-border developments in data transfer, data security, privacy and forms of production, managing the costs of eDisclosure, etc.

We’ll be at the Masters Conference and the Thompson Reuters 5^th Annual E-Disclosure Forum and bring you all the details.