Industry Trends

As I mentioned earlier this month, The Master’s Conference is kicking off its 11th year with an event in San Francisco today.  As part of our commitment to eDiscovery education, I’m delighted to be participating in the series again this year.  In preparation for today’s kickoff event, I interviewed Robert Childress, CEO of The Master’s Conference to understand how the event came to be and what makes it unique compared to other conferences within the eDiscovery schedule.

By the way, today’s event will be held at Bently Reserve, 301 Battery St, San Francisco, CA 94111.  Registration begins at 8am, with sessions starting right after that, at 8:30am.  Click here to register for the conference.  CloudNine will be sponsoring the session Data, Discovery, and Decisions: Extending Discovery From Collection To Creation at 1:45pm.  I will be moderating a panel that includes Gordon J. Calhoun, Partner with Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP, Jamie Raba, Attorney with Seyfarth Shaw LLP and Julia Romero Peter, General Counsel and Vice President of Sales with CloudNine.

Robert has continued to impact the many lives, companies and your day to day roles within the legal industry. If you are part of diversity groups, use legal research or products for processing and review, Robert has had a role. Mr. Childress is a visionary that focuses on bettering the legal community in all aspects. Robert has been recognized as one of the 25 most influential people in the legal industry. From the cover of magazines, news organizations and articles he has been a force in improving our industry. Over 25 years, he has held executive positions with some key legal corporations including Lexis-Nexis 5a Security, Thomson & Thomson, Elsevier Science, McGrawHill, Shepards, Wave Software and founder of The Masters Conference. Early in his career at LexisNexis, Robert managed product design, software sales for lexis.com. During his tenure, Robert has been awarded numerous contracts from clients such as the FBI, CIA, White House, Homeland Security, McDonald’s, Google, Littler and Walmart which have bolstered many company’s already elite portfolio of customers. Among his many achievements, Robert is the founder of the Masters Conference and the co-founder of a charity golf events, networking groups and associations for lawyers. Robert has been featured many times over the years within National Register Who’s Who, LTN Florida IT, Chicago Lawyer Legal Technology, BNA, INC. ARMA, EDRM Quarterly, ACEDS, and LTPI.  He is now part of the board of ACEDS, advisory panel of LTPI and serves on advisory roles within in many associations.

Tell me about your career before The Master’s Conference.  Why did you decide to launch the Conference?

I love this question, Doug, because I don’t think I lot of people are aware of my background.  In 1992, I was graduating high school, and I found this company in Colorado Springs called Shepards McGraw-Hill that was offering to pay for 80% of my college tuition.  So, I started working on “ending pages” from 6 am in the morning until noon and then went to school.  “Ending pages” was the process of going through a physical book of cases, case by case, and putting a check mark on the left or right side of the page just to tell where the case ended.  So, when we created the CD-Roms, they knew where to stop.

After a while, I started moving up in the company, and after I had got married, they offered me a great job in Washington DC after Lexis bought Shepard’s where I was the Lexis Nexis rep at age 25.  I was the youngest salesperson at Lexis (out of over 200 sales people), and I had this prime spot with the White House and FBI, among other clients.  I left Lexis in 2001 after working with Jeb Bush’s office at the time as the government rep for Lexis (I dealt with all of the governor’s offices in the southeast).  I noticed a CD in his office with a bill attached for $30,000, and I asked what it was for.  The secretary in the office said, “we had a guy collect data from a hard drive for us” (keep in mind, the term “eDiscovery” didn’t exist back then).  Because I was (and still am) a computer nerd, I knew how much per-megabyte costs were back then.  Not per gigabyte, per megabyte – a gigabyte was a lot of data back then.  I thought “holy crap, $30,000 is a lot to pay to pull around 600 or 700 MB of information!”

So, I started working with a friend who was a forensics expert, and we would make around $100,000 for three days’ worth of work.  We would collect and process hard drives and give the data to Holland and Knight law firm and others.  I decided to start a service bureau.  I went from a cushy job at Lexis with all of the perks, travel benefits, and so forth to working Sunday mornings at two in the morning preparing trial boards and exhibits and performing forensics for clients.  After four years of that, I realized that I was miserable – it was crazy money, but I never stopped working.

Having used LAW, Ipro and Discovery Cracker back then in 2005, I found an investor for a concept I had which became the company Wave Software with a software product called Trident.  Unless you had a lot of money to advertise with LegalTech and ALM, it was tough to get a product launched successfully.  So, I decided that I would create a users’ group that wasn’t around Wave Software, but would be separate.  In other words, I would create my conference, and I would get people to sponsor it, to pay for it.  That was called The Master’s Conference.

Lexis had this triangle approach to sales: product, education, and community.  You understand the education piece because CloudNine provides a lot of education.  With Wave and Master’s, I thought we need to have a membership group and realized that about 60% of the industry comprised of women, so I created Women in eDiscovery (WiE) with my wife, who recruited numerous high profile women in the industry and now it’s a huge group.  Now, I had that triangle approach.  That was my big impact on the space – those three things.

I left Wave Software in 2012 and WiE became non-profit, and The Master’s Conference became my primary focus.

How does your approach to The Master’s Conference differ from other conferences?

Now that I own a conference, it’s unusual because I have 21 years’ experience in legal research, forensic collections, and software development.  What’s different about Master’s is that I don’t run events, I enjoy events.  I enjoy the community and the dialogue.  I wish I had more money and resources to do what I enjoy.  When I engaged the other conferences during my time at Wave, it became very apparent that individuals who hosted events hadn’t been in the trenches.  They’ve never been doing client work at 2 am on a Sunday. They’ve never had experiences like that.  I think that’s my value.  While on the surface, Master’s may look like just another conference, but I know how to plug my provider participants into different clients and how you fit within those clients.  I understand that.

I don’t mean this as a “shot across the bow,” but more of clarification.  There are very few conferences that don’t have some agenda.  They’re either owned by a magazine or by a group that doesn’t focus on client relationships as I do.  They just happen to have an equitable division.  I used to sit on the board of LegalTech for about three years.  Some groups have a magazine and have had to publish for a long time and can’t get away from doing events because it’s so much revenue compared to their publishing piece, which has dwindled as everything has moved online.  So, they try to squeeze as much money as they can out of the events.  If you want a booth, great, that’s six grand, you want the floor sponsor, that’s six grand, and so forth.

There’s another group, which is the “click” group.  It’s the “good ole boy network.”  It’s the same usual suspects we saw eight years ago in one group, and you start to see factions start to happen.  We’ve seen it over the past couple of years where one speaker won’t be on the same panel as another speaker – even though they are both brilliant people, they just don’t like each other’s opinions.  But, if you research it, you find that both of them have a significant stake in what their respective organizations are doing so that influences their positions.

My focus is Diversity.  One, I’m not owned by any magazine, nobody can tell me what I can or can’t do.  Two, I listen to the clients and can “move on a dime” in meeting their needs.  For example, you and I are working on some stuff related to the webinars that you’re doing for CloudNine, and I can have that done and just say “let’s do it.”  I don’t have to get approval.  The third thing is when I speak about “diversity,” I’m not just talking about men, women or ethnicity; I’m talking about knowledge.

I’ll give you an example.  We had a prep call today for the San Francisco event, which has the theme of Minority Report. The discussion was on predictive analytics with a group that might not be part of the “click” that’s really receiving the opportunity to influence the debate at some of the other conferences because they’re unable to pay the money.  My idea is to take people from different groups, with different perspectives, regardless of resources they have to influence the conversation, and just try to solve the problem.

Where do you see The Master’s Conference heading in the future and how do you think that will coincide with the direction of the eDiscovery market?

Let me answer the market question first.  The more that the market continues to consolidate and these companies gobble up each other (and become part of IBM, Microsoft, HP, you name it), I think the opposite happens.  As more and more organizations start to “become one,” it opens up the specialty shops.  In the 90’s, there was a push for stores to all look the same within an organization, so, for example, regardless of which Home Depot you went into, you could find a hammer in the same place.  What’s happening with Yelp and other sites like it is that the specialty shops are emerging.  So, if you’re looking for a particular type of cheese, you’re looking for a cheese shop whereas, maybe ten years ago, you wanted to see if WalMart had it.  In our market, a similar thing is happening – the market is expanding, and that means we can focus on a lot of detailed offerings instead of just a one stop shop.  IBM bought PSS Atlas and had made other acquisitions and rolled it into their program.  They were the third-day keynote and LegalTech and had all these pitches, yet nowhere that I go I hear about IBM.

So, I think Master’s will always have a play.  There will always be plenty of clients for us, lots of opportunities, especially when you consider that the mid-tier and small firm markets have yet to be tapped.  In those businesses, you can buy a product without having to go through so many hoops to get approval to buy it.  So, I see the market exploding.  You also see cyber getting more involved in our space, and I think we’re bridging the gap between law and cyber.  We’re eleven years old, and we’ve been a player for a long time. I believe the next step for Master’s is to continue to refine, continue to develop high content, deliver great speakers and provide great experiences while still keeping it attainable and affordable for our clients to participate while being diverse.

Thanks, Robert, for your time!

So, what do you think?  Are you going to be in San Francisco on April 25?  If so, come join us!  And, as always, 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.

Don’t be a chump, be the ump!  It’s time for another quarterly eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey!  This time, it’s the Spring 2017 eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey created (and cleverly titled) by Rob Robinson and conducted on his terrific Complex Discovery site.  It’s the second year of the quarterly survey and we’ve covered every round of the survey so far (2016 coverage of results are here, here, here and here, and Winter 2017 coverage is here).  Now, it’s time for the Spring 2017 Survey!

As before, the eDiscovery Business Confidence Survey is a non-scientific survey designed to provide insight into the business confidence level of individuals working in the eDiscovery ecosystem. The term ‘business’ represents the economic factors that impact the creation, delivery, and consumption of eDiscovery products and services.

This year’s survey consists of nine multiple choice questions focused on factors related to the creation, delivery, and consumption of eDiscovery products and services and may be useful for eDiscovery-related business planning.  It’s a simple nine question survey that literally takes about a minute to complete.  Who hasn’t got a minute to provide useful information?  As always, individual answers are kept confidential.

The Spring 2017 Survey response period is between today and achievement of 100 responses or May 31, 2017 (whichever comes first).  If last quarter is indicative of the voting, the survey will be closed way before May 31.  So, vote early if you want to be counted!  What more do you need?  Click here to take the survey yourself.

Now that we have entered a second year for the survey, we’ve started to evaluate year over year results to differentiate those variations from quarterly fluctuations and eDiscovery Daily will cover the results once again!

So, what do you think?  Are you confident in the state of business within the eDiscovery industry?  Share your thoughts in the survey and, as always, please share any comments you might have with us or let us know 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.

I’m delighted to be participating in The Master’s Conference series again this year.  If you’re in the San Francisco area or plan to be there on April 25, join me and other legal technology experts and professionals at The Master’s Conference event for a full day of educational sessions covering a wide range of topics!

The Master’s Conference brings together leading experts and professionals from law firms, corporations and the bench to develop strategies, practices and resources for managing the information life cycle.  This year’s San Francisco event covers topics ranging from technology evaluations to forces changing eDiscovery to mobile device and social media discovery.  Cybersecurity and data science are covered too.

The event will be held at Bently Reserve, 301 Battery St, San Francisco, CA 94111.  Registration begins at 8am, with sessions starting right after that, at 8:30am.

CloudNine will be sponsoring the session Data, Discovery, and Decisions: Extending Discovery From Collection To Creation at 1:45pm.  I will be moderating a panel that includes Gordon J. Calhoun, Partner with Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP, Jamie Raba, Attorney with Seyfarth Shaw LLP and Julia Romero Peter, General Counsel and Vice President of Sales with CloudNine.

Our panel discussion will discuss how big data is impacting today’s litigation landscape, the use of non-traditional tools and approaches and how more and more organizations are conducting “data discovery” pre-litigation.  It should be a very informative discussion with a very knowledgeable panel!  Hope you can join us!

Click here to register for the conference.  If you’re a non-vendor, the cost is only $175 to attend for the full day (that cost goes up to $300 after next Tuesday, April 18).

This year, The Master’s Conference also has events scheduled for Chicago, Denver, New York City, London(!), Washington DC and Orlando.  Click here for more information on remaining scheduled events for the year.

So, what do you think?  Are you going to be in San Francisco on April 25?  If so, come join us!  And, as always, 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.

Since this blog was founded in 2010, we have certainly covered each LegalTech New York (LTNY) conference extensively, with (in most years) a pre-show look, coverage of eDiscovery related sessions each day, a post mortem set of observations from LTNY attendees and an annual thought leader interview series (this year was our seventh annual series).  But, nobody covers the show quite like Andrew Haslam.

Andrew’s annual write-up on LTNY is as comprehensive a look at the show as you’ll find.  This year, his write-up (cheekily titled Do you want AI with that?) is a ten page overview that covers everything from the theme of the show in his observation (which is reflected in the title of the write-up) to weather and travel (for Andrew, that is across the pond from Britain) to the venue to a host of (sometimes brutally frank) observations from participants (including yours truly) and Andrew’s own observations from meetings with various vendors at the show (including CloudNine).  The title comes from his observation that “as in the fast food industry where ‘do you want fries with that?’ became a standard upsell to any order, so AI seems to be tacked on to every presentation (and a lot of demonstrations) at the event.”

Andrew’s report was a little later than usual this year as he now has a different “day job” as the UK eDisclosure Project Manager at Squire Patton Boggs and he notes that the opinions are his own and not those of his employer.  I can relate as every post I write has that disclaimer paragraph at the bottom that you see.  Regardless, Andrew’s LTNY write-up is always uniquely informative and entertaining and a great read.

A link to Andrew’s report can be found at Legal IT Insider here.

So, what do you think?  Did you attend LTNY this year?  If so, what did YOU think of the event?  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.

Do do do

Down dooby doo down down

Comma, comma, down dooby doo down down

Comma, comma, down dooby doo down down

Breaking up is hard to do

Not since Neil Sadaka’s classic song has a “comma” meant so much.  A class-action lawsuit about overtime pay for truck drivers has come down to punctuation and the lack of an Oxford comma has resulted in an appeals court reversal of a partial summary judgment by a lower court.

As reported by Newser (Dairy Drivers in Maine Are Celebrating a Missing Comma, written by Jenn Gidman), dairy drivers in Maine won an appeal because of a missing Oxford comma. In the suit over overtime pay against Oakhurst Dairy, first filed in 2014, drivers complained that a list of tasks not eligible for overtime did not make it clear whether “distribution” counted, mainly because of the lack of the Oxford comma.

FWIW, an Oxford comma is defined as a comma used after the penultimate item in a list of three or more items, before ‘and’ or ‘or’ (e.g. Michelangelo was an Italian painter, sculptor, and architect).  Some believe it should be used and others don’t, so the usage of it varies.

In this case, three truck drivers sued Oakhurst Dairy in 2014, seeking more than four years’ worth of back overtime pay that they had not been paid. Maine law requires workers to be paid 1.5 times their normal rate for each hour worked after 40 hours, but it also identifies certain exemptions, as noted in Maine state law, which says (in Exemption F) that overtime rules do not apply to:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

(1) Agricultural produce;

(2) Meat and fish products; and

(3) Perishable foods.

So, does that mean overtime rules don’t apply to packing for shipment and they also don’t apply to distribution?  Or does it mean that overtime rules don’t apply to packing, for shipment or distribution?

The district court ruled the former, which interpreted the law as excluding those involved in distribution (e.g., truck drivers) from overtime pay.  The drivers appealed, and in a 29-page court decision handed down on Monday, the First Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the District Court’s grant of partial summary judgment to the defendant.  Referring to the language as “ambiguous”, the Court stated:

“Given that the delivery drivers contend that they engage in neither packing for shipment nor packing for distribution, the District Court erred in granting Oakhurst summary judgment as to the meaning of Exemption F. If the drivers engage only in distribution and not in any of the standalone activities that Exemption F covers – a contention about which the Magistrate Judge recognized possible ambiguity – the drivers fall outside of Exemption F’s scope and thus within the protection of the Maine overtime law.”

The amount at stake could be as much as $10 million.  Thanks to the absence of an Oxford comma, those truck drivers may yet recoup that amount.

So, what do you think?   Can you think of any other cases that may have turned on punctuation?  Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!

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.