Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: . Published: 2013-06-05 09:00:43 An area of great interest for me is international eDiscovery. I spent quite a bit of time in Europe in the mid-2000’s doing forensic collections and onsite projects as well as serving the first couple of years on the Sedona International Working Group (WG6). It was my experience that when dealing with data privacy issues in the EU, once we negotiated the model contract (after we included local counsel, of course), it was fairly easy to bring the data back to the United States and manage the workflow outlined by the EU governing bodies. I’m over-simplifying the process and legal issues, but at least there was a path defined in the EU.Amazingly, I have never worked on a project where I was required to go to Asia, but I have done numerous projects in my career with CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) where we had to create customized workflows to minimize costs in the face of large volumes of multi-lingual ESI. CJK projects are particularly tricky because those languages use a double-byte character set and there are challenges to even indexing the data properly.There are always new and emerging technologies to help with CJK projects such as UBIC’s CJK predictive coding engine and HP/Autonomy which helps categorize the data to help with review sets. As I learn more about these products including their strengths and challenges, I will continue to report back to the readers at eDiscoveryJournal. I will also be tracking service providers both in the US and Asia offering collection and processing of CJK languages.One of the issues brought to my attention in the past few weeks while I’ve been gearing up for my research is that it’s expensive to hire contract attorneys to review documents in their native language. There are several of the larger review companies that I plan to speak to about their offerings in this area like Epiq, TransPerfect, and Hudson Legal as well as few boutique players like Japanese Doc Review and UBIC that have specialization in this area.I’m excited about visiting Hong Kong and Shanghai in June to participate in InnoxCell’s eDiscovery Exchange conference. I’ll be moderating several panels throughout the week to a true multi-cultural audience. I’m both excited and a bit tentative on addressing eDiscovery with these audiences. I’m used to the US style of invigorating discussion and it is my understanding that may not be the norm in Asia. The good news is that I’m pretty adaptable to these types of situations and I’m sure I can make it work.My primary research area for the rest of the year will be on international eDiscovery issues for both Asia and the EU. I will be sharing with the eDiscoveryJournal audience each step of my path as I expand my learning to the PAC-RIM arena as well as continuing to explore EU data privacy laws. I plan on generating several blogs over the next few months as well as a report (or two) covering my findings and conclusions in the fall.Please feel free to email me with any ideas or any companies/products you would like to see covered as part of this research. If you have a product or service offering related to Asian eDiscovery, please don’t hesitate to reach out and we can coordinate a briefing.Next stop…Hong Kong!!!Jason Velasco can be reached at jason@edjgroupinc.com for offline comments or questions. His active research topics include International eDiscovery and Data Privacy Issues, Evaluating eDiscovery Service Providers and eDiscovery Special Masters.Find Jason at the following future events (please feel free to email to see if any passes or discounts are available):
- Hong Kong, China – Innoxcell’s Asia eDiscovery Exchange, June 18-19
- Shanghai, China – Innoxcell’s Asia eDiscovery Exchange, June 20
Connect with Jason:
- Twitter: @jsnvelasco