It has been a busy time of late in the e-discovery space in New Zealand. An unfortunate result of which is that I have somewhat neglected my blog over the last couple of weeks, which I only realised when a couple of my readers contacted me directly about when I am posting my next blog post.
LawLink Conference
Thw week before last I was fortunate enough to be invited to present a session at the annual Lawlink conference in Rotorua. Lawlink is a network of 18 independent law firms throughout New Zealand, mostly made up of small and medium sized firms. The keynote speaker was Chrissie Lightfoot of The Entrepreneur Lawyer. Chrissie presented a very thought provoking session primarily focussing on the importance of branding the individual in a digital legal world.
The session I presented was on how law firms can better utilise technology in their practice. Most of the queries that I fielded after the session and since were around how they can work with the new e-discovery rules. With the amount of follow-up conversations I have had with these firms, there is a real interest as to how they can look at methods of more efficiently tackling e-discovery.
Often there is the perception from some medium and smaller law firms that they are at a significant disadvantage compared to the larger firms when tackling exercises like discovery. I would argue most of the success stories that I witness in smaller law firms is how they can utilise technology more efficiently to be able to compete with the larger firms. Often smaller firms don’t have the option to just throw resource at an issue, so they can benefit more from expert guidance as well as the more efficient use of technology.
One area that has been very busy of late is the increasing volume of queries from organisations seeking an e-discovery product to solve all their problems. Most are looking for the ‘holy grail’ of the one stop product, that doesn’t cost the earth – aren’t we all ! Like I have mentioned in a previous post, it is important to seek advice on the options available before you jump in and purchase any new tool. For smaller and medium size firms, it is important that they select the right solution to suit their needs, not just go with a product that a larger firm has invested in. Obviously seeking independent advice about the options available will assist in finding the right solution for them.
AccessData Summation launch
A couple of weeks back I moderated the Q&A sessions for AccessData when they visited New Zealand to showcase their new Summation product. Those attending were predominantly existing Summation users. Like any new product the real test will come after it has been rolled out for a period of time and feedback is available from the users. The new version of Summation for Asia Pacific is due to be released later this year (The rest of the world had their version released a couple of weeks back).
The next few weeks continue to be very busy when I look at my diary. I am looking forward to a visit to Sydney next month for the Chilli IQ’s 6th Information Management & E-Discovery Summit. The conference is currently the only one in relation to E-Discovery in Australasia scheduled for 2012 – I wrote about the importance of such an event in raising awareness in an earlier post. I have noted that Chilli IQ have now confirmed some leading speakers for the event (which I will comment further about in an upcoming post). I am also down as one of the speakers, so I will have some preparation for that.
Busy is good as it means that more people are getting exposure to the evolving e-discovery issues and are able to make more informed decisions about their e-discovery obligations.
