Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Greg Buckles. Published: 2013-04-11 04:55:38Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. The eDJ team speaks at a lot of events, webinars, conferences, lunch-n-learns and retreats that all have their pros and cons. Last week I ran our first “bootcamp” on corporate mobile discovery in Los Angeles. The bootcamp concept was to run interactive scenarios on a single topic for 30-60 corporate and law firm participants. I had no idea how much prep work would be involved to create the corporate profiles, players, module challenges, approaches and team decisions for this half day session. Fortunately for me, mobile device
discovery is a serious enough concern that we actually had folks fly in to participate. Truth be told, I was too ambitious in trying to cover policy through production of mobile content. In the end, we adapted on the fly to feedback, and kept the emphasis on minimizing unique mobile content, preservation strategies and real life collection options. We managed to cover the complexities of processing, reviewing and producing mobile ESI, but the overwhelming majority of teams made proactive policy and technology decisions to keep mobile content out of scope for their fictitious Acme corporation. I find it fascinating how mobile content has become the latest “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” eDiscovery source.
Despite the overwhelming desire to just make it all disappear, the level of attendance and active participation demonstrated the reluctant realization that personal smart phones, tablets and other mobile sources have infiltrated corporate firewalls and that they have to be dealt with in some matters. Gordon Calhoun of Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP provided outside counsel perspective and experience in large investigations and matters. His firm uses web based custodial surveys to support their interview process and reduce mobile content where it is reasonably out of scope. FTI Technology sponsored our lunch and we kept their Erik Hammerquist around to answer hard questions about the time, user impact and cost involved in real life collections. Although we did not expect any of the familiar faces from the event circuit, I truly enjoyed putting Erik Laykin, Duff & Phelps’ Managing Director, on the spot and drafted him into our scenario role playing. That’s right, our teams had to talk to Acme’s CIO, Communications Director, custodians and more to understand how mobile devices were already being used in the workplace, and decide what could be done to manage their eDiscovery impact. I know that I had a lot of fun using real life interview responses from our consulting practice on my unsuspecting audience.
These bootcamps are a brand new concept for us and the attendee feedback will help us refine the scope of the content, scenarios and the team decisions. For a first time eDiscovery event, I was pleased that only one person bailed early for a client call and they even sent a nice apology note giving the reason that they left. Even better, we were able to keep the discussion going after the session for several hours with over half of the attendees. Reception from the attendees was overwhelmingly positive with 90% of them giving a five out five rating for both presenters and stating that the materials were excellent and covered difficult subjects that mattered to this industry. Overall, it was worth the heavy preparation work and I know that my teammates are incorporating my lessons learned for their upcoming bootcamps. I have listed below all of our upcoming boot camps over the next couple of months. I hope that you can join us and let your inner geek come out to play.
eDiscoveryJournal Boot Camp Schedule
- April 16, Houston, TX: Legal Hold
- April 17, Washington, DC: Predictive Coding
- April 18, Dallas, TX: Legal Hold
- April 24 Chicago, IL: Predictive Coding
- April 30, Philadelphia, PA: Predictive Coding
- May 6, Pittsburgh, PA: Predictive Coding
- May 14, Boston, MA: Predictive Coding
- May 16, New York, NY: Selecting eDiscovery Technology & Service
Solutions - June 4, Atlanta, GA: Legal Hold
Greg Buckles, eDiscoveryJournal Contributor and Lead Analyst