The Masters Conference: Navigating through Discovery, Risk and Security

The Masters Conference (click here) will be held on October 13th and 14th in Washington, DC.  The Masters conference brings together leading experts and professionals from law firms, corporations and the bench to develop strategies, practices and resources for managing the information life cycle.

The theme for this year’s conference, “Global Corporate Change – Navigating through Discovery, Risk and Security,” focuses on how corporations can protect themselves against the risks associated with high-profile scandals, security breaches, IP threats, increased litigation, audits and regulatory investigations.

The Conference was created in 2006 to provide an opportunity for advanced practical education for corporate counsel and law firms.  Its mission is to have speakers, product and service providers, and attendees work together:

*  The speakers, leaders in their fields, provide education on the issues and how they translate into practice.

*  The providers develop solutions to fit the needs arising from corporate records management and litigation.

*   The attendees contribute real-world experience.

To make this work, the conference is smaller and more intimate than many of the other conferences in the industry. The organizers strive to create interactive sessions where the speakers interact with the attendees.   There is also a easier opportunity to speak with providers that offer clients their products and services that meet their needs, and for providers to have an opportunity to interact with the educators, speakers, and attendees. 

We have expanded our coverage of these conferences (LegalTech, ILTA, the ILSL, the IQPC series, etc.) to provide information for our diverse membership: contract attorneys, law firms, corporations, e-discovery vendors, bar associations, legal media, etc.

But our focus is on the growing opportunities for our core membership (contract attorneys and temporary attorneys) so they know the ins-and-outs of electronically stored information (ESI) because:

1.  e-discovery vendors continue to move into the “right-side” of the EDRM, picking up document review and production; and

2.  corporations continue their trend to by-pass law firms and go directly to these e-discovery vendors to manage their ESI needs as companies, desperate to save a buck or two, secure more ownership over the e-discovery process to enhance control and reduce costs.  Leveraging in-house technologies and deploying early case assessment methodologies results in data reduction strategies.

It  means opportunities for Posse List members beyond the “click click click” of document review as demonstrated by a growing number of e-discovery vendors, in-house legal departments, and other entities who have posted projects and positions on our job lists that seek a well-founded e-discovery background.  It is a trend we have cited with by such reports as those from the Sapire Search Group and Rees Morrison.

So we cover these conferences, and we continue to expand our Electronic Discovery Reading Room (click here) to provide as many “primers” and background briefs as we can on ESI management and e-discovery.

And all of this segues into the area of governance, risk and compliance (GRC).  This is not a “new new thing” and has been chronicled for well over the last year and half.  This convergence of e-discovery and GRC technology and management is reshaping the industry.  It the major focus at this year’s Masters Conference.

A special thank you note:  It is a daunting task for any organization to organize and launch a program of this magnitude.  Luckily they have Sasha Hefler, President of the Masters Conference (click here) who is responsible for a million things including: the list of speakers and subjects; press releases; event sponsorships; public relations; webinars; testimonials; interviews; white papers, etc., etc.   

And despite this awesome “to do” list she has gone beyond the call of duty to help The Posse List.  We are fielding 3 staff members and several bloggers at the conference and she has found time to process our registrations and provide all the back-up material we requested on speakers and vendors, etc.

We’ll have a chance to interview Sasha during the conference.  For now, some of the sessions we expect to cover to give you a flavor of the conference:

When Good Faith is not Good Enough

The global economic crisis is making its mark: a rising tide of corporate litigation, consolidations and mergers, and some of the century’s most sweeping changes to corporate governance. Regulators are promising hard hitting new rules and hefty sanctions impacting all sectors. Boards of directors, customers, courts and regulators are taking notice and demanding action.   As legal departments and their IT brethren are struggling to bring information governance and eDiscovery in line with tightening rules and regulations, the exponential growth of geographically dispersed information from a raft of data sources presents them with a daunting challenge. Traditional policies and methods for governance and discovery of electronically stored information are falling short, yet organizations must comply or risk fines and sanctions that put shareholder value, public confidence and brand integrity at risk.  The legal and regulatory environment surrounding information governance is evolving in three phases. This panel will discuss the opportunities and risks affecting legal and compliance officers, trends in case law and rules, and best practices for managing the disciplines of information governance and discovery through the evolution.

E-Discovery: Why Most Enterprise Implementations Fail to Make the Grade

It takes just 10,000 employees to generate more electronic documents in a year than is contained in the entire Library of Congress. It is easy to see how archiving e-mail and files for large enterprises can be a daunting challenge. This session cuts through the vendors’ marketing brochures to identify the real problems, formulate the hard questions to ask vendors and outline ways to evaluate and compare solutions to fit your needs. Armed with this knowledge, your chances of implementation success can be significantly improved.

Early Case Assessment: Looking to the Future – From Early Assessment to Early Awareness

ECA technology is poised to radically change how companies approach e-Discovery.  However, those who view ECA as only a cost-saving solution for eDiscovery have taken too narrow a view of its application. The distinguishing capability of ECA — rapid search & intelligent classification of vast information stores — when combined with effective processes, will enable corporations to adopt innovative strategies focused on discovery, data privacy, data loss, general records & information management as well as cost reduction.

Enabling Transformative Technologies – The Science &Engineering and the Law

The law has not caught up with emerging technology development modalities, with costly consequences.  Changing this state of affairs requires better understanding of how transformational technology advancements will be enabled,  to anticipate such trends and create the appropriate legal infrastructure.  This lecture will focus on better understanding how the two major recent trends of globalization and the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of technological innovation require for more synergistic partnerships between industry and academe.  The efforts to solve the most challenging problems facing us –whether related to energy (oil, nuclear, solar, wind), critical infrastructure systems (electrical power grids, transportation systems), homeland security, global communication systems, etc — would benefit from such interactions.  Topics covered will include emerging scientific, technological and policy directions; guiding principles; types of interaction and collaboration; opportunities, constraints and expected outcomes.  There will also be an assessment of new processes and frameworks catalyzed through government involvement.  All lawyers can better counsel their clients, particularly in industry, when they have a good understanding of where technology and technology development modalities are heading, and how such trends can be advantageously leveraged.

E-discovery Evolution and Revolution: an Early Case Assessment Movement

The high cost of traditional e-discovery methods and the economic downturn have made it difficult on the corporate counsel and IT staff of enterprise organizations when they respond to legal discovery requests. The costs associated with gathering and processing electronically stored information and ensuring that the complete set of evidence is included in the response to a discovery request have become significant  problems for many organizations.  This has led many in these organizations to question the validity of the historical approach of collecting everything associated with a presumed set of custodians and sending all that data out for processing. The IT manager and the corporate legal department are both being asked if there is a better way to identify the relevant ESI for given matters and to produce it locally (inside the corporate security perimeter), sending smaller more relevant sets out for eventual attorney review. This panel discussion will focus on new Early Case Assessment (ECA) approaches that can be taken within the corporate security perimeter to produce the relevant material for litigation matters without incurring high discovery and review costs associated with the “over-collection and processing” problem encountered when only outside vendors are used. Proactive methods for discovering content rapidly and identifying irrelevant content that need not be produced will be discussed.

Beyond E-mail:  Legal and Practical Implications of 21st Century ESI

Just when lawyers have become comfortable advising clients about how to handle traditional forms of ESI under the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, new media has emerged that present increasingly complicated and far-reaching strategic and practical challenges.  E-discovery is no longer just about email, electronic documents and databases located on company servers.  Instead, law and technology intersect over dynamic ESI, often times stored beyond the direct control of the user.  Applications that foster social communication (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the various software supporting blog publications) and multimedia sharing portals (YouTube, Flickr, Picasa) qualify as ESI under Rule 34.  And it’s not just tech-savvy individuals making use of new media.  Businesses are using web-based project management tools (Basecamp, EtherPad), social enterprise software (Jive, Socialtext), and cloud computing (GoogleApps) along with digital voicemail, IM and off-site data archiving to facilitate productivity and reduce corporate expenditures. On top of all that, we are on the verge a revolution in e-mail technology that will change the game completely… again!   In litigation, how should lawyers approach collection, preservation, processing, review and production of 21st century media?  What sources must parties disclose in discovery?  Is new media the next treasure-trove of discoverable potentially relevant information in terms of both tangible data and facts?

Litigation Readiness and the Left Side of the EDRM Model – Decreasing Discovery Cost and Risk

Document review can account for more than 70% of the total cost of e-discovery.  This panel will discuss reducing the cost of e-discovery and document review by focusing on litigation readiness and the strategic application of technology early in the process in order to reduce the size of the electronic evidence corpus.

Driving Down Electronic Discovery Costs:  The Challenge of Bringing Electronic Discovery Inside the Corporation

Corporations are striving to reduce overall litigation costs by assuming control over not only the decision making, but the harvesting and processing of electronic data.  Decision makers must take into account not only technology purchases, but process protocols and talent to function successfully as the environment changes.  Attendees will engage in a frank discussion among industry peers, learning the pitfalls and opportunities of bringing more and more inside the corporate infrastructure.  Attend this session to hear the panelists discuss which comes first, technology, process or people? 

US-UK Judicial Panel on E-Discovery

Although the US leads the world in both the legal and technical aspects of electronic discovery, there is a general acceptance that there is much to do to make this aspect of litigation an efficient and cost-effective component of case management. Although the essential difficulties are the same in England and Wales, the approach taken is a slightly different one, and there is growing recognition that the two jurisdictions have something to learn from each other.
 
Chief US Magistrate Judge Paul Grimm and US Magistrate Judge John Facciola are the undisputed leaders of judicial thought in this area in the US. Their counterparts in the UK are Senior Master Whitaker and His Honour Judge Simon Brown QC. These four were brought together, with Chris Dale of the UK based e-Disclosure Information Project, at a successful panel in London in May 2009, moderated by Patrick Burke, Assistant General Counsel at Guidance Software. The Masters Conference is reconstituting the panel and you will have the opportunity to hear the best thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic talking about the differences, the commonality, and what each can learn from the other in this changing area.

We will have full coverage including posts and interviews.  Please bookmark this page.