Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Kevin Esposito. Published: 2011-11-01 18:03:11Format, images and links may no longer function correctly. 
Recently I had the opportunity to participate in the EDRM Mid Year Meeting in St.Paul, Minnesota. The midyear meeting is a great opportunity for all of the individual project groups to come together and evaluate the progress made on key projects for the year. Although a midyear review may be standard operating procedure for large corporations, few industry groups that I’ve been exposed to have the discipline to insist on such a midyear checkpoint.
I’ve previously mentioned in this space that I’m co-chair of the Model Code of Conduct project, which is working to provide some aspirational guidelines for ethical business practices related to eDiscovery. The Model Code has been a tough project that has taken several years of debate, comment and negotiation among law firms, consultants, software developers and service providers. At the yearly kickoff meeting in May of this year, we opened the Model Code up for public comment. We reviewed those comments during the mid-year meeting and incorporated some of what was provided in the latest version of the Model Code. The Model Code working group is in constant communication and we still welcome any comments or suggestions that interested parties may have to make. If you would like to see the latest version of the Model Code, please go here. If you would like to provide comments, you can do so at the site, or you can email me here at eDiscovery Journal and I’ll forward the information along.
The initial version of the Model Code of Conduct is now complete and will be published in January 2012 just before next year’s Legal Tech.
The Model Code of Conduct project team was only one of several that had milestones to report on at this particular meeting. EDRM continues to grow and solidify its position as the forum for open discussion of discovery issues. There is a new collaborative effort with ARMA that helps to bring together discovery professionals and records managers on issues related to information governance. There are ongoing projects in the areas of Metrics, XML, Search and Testing that will bring even more collaborative efforts.
I’ve been in this space for over 12 years, but have found you learn the most when you get out and talk to your peers – and yes, even your competitors – about what we do the same and what we do differently. The key is to get out, meet people and start an open dialogue.
If you know of other groups that help to promote communication and collaboration in Discovery, email me so we can spread the word.