eDiscovery Daily Blog

• January 26, 2016

Believe it or not, but LegalTech® New York 2016 (LTNY) is just one week away!  eDiscovery Daily will be covering the show for the sixth year in a row.  And, also for the sixth year in a row, we will be conducting our annual thought leader series at the show.  More on that later.

Anyway, we thought we would take an advanced look at the show and make a couple of initial observations.  If you’re attending the show next week, let us know if you have any additional thoughts or particular areas of interest that you will be checking out next week.

Where Have all the Predictive Coding Sessions Gone?: In the past few years, sessions about predictive coding or technology assisted review (TAR) were plentiful, with two to three sessions per day at last year’s show.  This year, there appears to be only two sessions related to PC and TAR overall, with a third session discussing analytics in general.  Conversely, there are about 2-3 sessions per day discussing cybersecurity.  Is predictive coding not “cool” anymore?  I’m curious as to whether the lack of sessions is because it’s no longer “trendy” to talk about predictive coding, or that it’s assumed that most attendees already use some form of predictive coding or that it’s assumed that most do not use predictive coding?  I will be interested to get some thoughts from attendees at the show about this trend.

Number of Exhibitors Continues to Drop: Every year, I go to the exhibitor’s page of the LTNY site and count the number of exhibitors listed for the show.  Here are the counts for the past five years: 2012 – 225, 2013 – 225, 2014 – 218, 2015 – 199, this year – 174.  See the trend?  That’s a 22.7% drop in number of exhibitors since 2013.  Is that because more providers are choosing not to exhibit at LTNY?  Or there are less providers in the legal technology industry due to consolidation?  Or are more exhibitors simply opting for larger double booths, so there is less total booths available for exhibitors?  Perhaps it’s possibly a combination of all of the above factors.

There are tracks each day related to information governance and eDiscovery, so there should be plenty of interesting sessions to attend.  On Tuesday, there are three tracks related to IG and ED: Track 1 (Information Governance and Big Data), Track 2 (Disruptive eDiscovery and Data Security Trends) and Track 6 (Change is Coming: Exploring the Now and the Near of Ediscovery and Legal Services).  On Wednesday, there is one track related to ED: Track 5 (Ediscovery in Action) and on Thursday,  there are two tracks related to IG and ED: Track 3 (2016: Information Governance Challenges) and Track 4 (eDiscovery Breakthroughs: Analytics and the Changing Face of Discovery).

Here are three sessions of particular interest that I recommend checking out if you can:

• How is Technology Being Used in Today’s Court Rooms and Cases?: The opening keynote presentation on Tuesday at 9:00am. Five US judges describe what they are currently seeing in their courts regarding big data, analytics, eDiscovery and other technologies.
• 25 Ediscovery Warnings in 75 Minutes: Common Blunders that Befall Litigation Teams: Wednesday at 3:45pm. Expanded version of the session that was presented at ILTACON last year.  Great opportunity to hear from your colleagues (including yours truly) about real-world problems experienced in eDiscovery and how to address them.
• Private Network Servers, Deleted Emails & Texts and Other Controversies in the News: Thursday keynote at 9:00am. Great opportunity to hear from experts Jason R. Baron, Judge Shira Scheindlin and Edward B. MacMahon, Jr. (hiyo!) on newsworthy eDiscovery challenges, such as the State Department emails and “deflategate”.

So, what do you think?  Are you attending LegalTech next week?  If so and if you see me, say “hi”!  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.