E-discovery Update from the Sedona Institute March 2013

Susans Wortzman and Nickle attended the 7th Annual Sedona Conference Institute “Living on eDiscovery’s Cutting Edge” at the end of March in San Diego, California.

As predicted, the Sedona Conference® attracted an excellent faculty that led the attendees (hundreds of Americans, four Canadians and one Irish counsel) through a varied and ambitious agenda, using the “dialogue not debate” model. The agenda covered everything from the expected (the Cloud, proportionality, and a case law update) to the less expected (ethics, and expert roundtables on particular areas of law – regulatory matters, employment actions).

A great deal of “dialogue” involved the subject of technology assisted review (“TAR”), a topic which surfaced frequently throughout the 1.5 day conference. TAR is being used frequently in the U.S., with courts endorsing (and sometimes mandating) its use to reduce enormous volumes of electronic information and reduce the costs of e-discovery.

There are compelling research studies that support TAR, and one pending which will be of particular interest as it will outline which TAR software outperforms its competitors.

This conference lived up to its hype as one of the landmark conferences in the U.S. The only disappointment?  Notwithstanding sessions on cross-border discovery issues, data protection, privacy and other “international” topics, there was no mention whatsoever of Canada.

​Perhaps we’ll work on raising the Canadian profile for next year’s conference.