Guest Blog: Innovate CLE in Orlando on October 17th and 18th

EDITORS NOTE: This is a guest blog by Samir Mathur, the Managing Director of IT-LEX, Inc., the non-profit charitable organization behind the Innovate Conference. The e-Discovery Team urges you to move your schedule around so that you can attend this event in Winter Park, Florida (just outside of Orlando, the home of Rollins College and Ralph Losey). Click here to Register today for Innovate.

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GUEST BLOG: The inaugural IT-Lex Innovate Conference is coming up later this month, and there’s a lot to be excited about. Let’s start with the location: the Alfond Inn only opened its doors a few weeks ago, and in addition to being a first-class hotel and conference venue, it’s also home to an unparalleled collection of modern art. From sculptures to photographs to paintings, there’s a lot of thought-provoking work to take in. The Alfond is also walking distance from Winter Park’s exclusive Park Avenue, with upscale restaurants, bars, and a Pottery Barn inside a cool old movie theater.

The Innovate agenda is even more impressive. The first panel of the conference will feature Anthony Mendenhall, a recent law graduate and the winner of the first IT-Lex/Foley & Lardner writing competition. Anthony will be presenting his winning essay, and discussing it with current and previous federal judges. We’ll then have a Computer Science 101 session to bring the less technologically-savvy up to speed, and close out Thursday’s program with what promises to be a fascinating panel. Thanks in large part to Mr. Snowden’s busy summer, online privacy has been a widely-discussed matter this summer, and we’re bringing together high-ranking representatives from the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI’s Cyber Intrusions Squad – not making that name up – and Google, to discuss the state of digital privacy today.

Our program on Friday begins with another sure-to-be classic panel: eDiscovery allstars Jason Baron, Maura Grossman and Ralph Losey will be getting together for the first time to talk about predictive coding, and where its future may be. Will the use of predictive coding become more widespread? Or is it just the latest technological trend that will come and go? Nobody knows more about this topic than these panelists, and when they get together, things should get lively.

Later we’ll be discussing ethics – particularly the requirements of competency and confidentiality – before a couple of more detailed, practitioner-oriented panels. First, there’s Preservation & Collection: since 1722’s Armory v. Delamirie case, the duty to preserve has been an essential part of the discovery process. To see how big of a deal it is, check out how many stories we have at IT-Lex under the “spoliation” category. (It’s a lot). The panelists here will discuss best practices, issues and solutions.

After a working lunch where we’ll run through some of the highlights from the first year of the IT-Lex blog, is the ‘Clawbacks, Cooperation and Competence’ panel. Here, panelists including the Hon. John M. Facciola, the Hon. Nan R. Nolan (Ret.), the Hon. Lawrence H. Kolin, and Tom O’Connor, will be talking about the orders that are often used in place of more-expensive privilege reviews. Cooperation may seem like a foreign concept in the world of high-stakes adversarial litigation, but a full understanding of clawbacks can make litigation smoother and more cost-effective for everyone, and that’s a good thing.

With most people on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever this week’s big site might be, social media is a big, largely unexplored area in the world of electronic discovery. After the panel on social media, we’ll shift our focus to online security, and particularly, to data breaches. It seems like a certainty in this day and age that, at some point, your law firm, or your client, is going to get hacked. How do you try to prevent this, and how do you respond when it happens? Do you have to report the breach to the authorities, or to individuals who may have been affected? We’ll close out Innovate with a Judicial Roundtable – our distinguished guests from the bench will discuss various technology law matters, and take questions from the audience.

Speaking of questions, we’re trying a couple of things at Innovate to keep the conference a bit more interactive. Attendees can submit questions for any of the panels in advance, or at the event itself, via email (innovate@it-lex.org) or Twitter (@ITLexOrg). If you submit a question through either of those channels, we’ll keep your anonymity – the panelists won’t know who asked what question, so feel free to ask whatever you’d like. Additionally, none of our speakers will be using Power Points, so that should make each panel feel more like a discussion and less like a law school lecture.

If you’re reading this post, then you’re likely already the kind of person whom we’d love to see at the conference. There are only a couple of weeks until it all happens, so please head to www.it-lex.org/innovate/ to register online, and we look forward to welcoming you to Orlando and to Innovate.