eDiscovery Daily Blog
eDiscovery Trends: A Site Designed to Facilitate Meet and Confer Conferences
The past two days, we discussed the basics of the Rule 26(f) “meet and confer” conference and details regarding the topics to discuss during that conference. Hopefully, you found that review informative.
Now, as noted in a recent Law Technology News article by Sean Doherty, there’s a web application to facilitate the process to prepare for and conduct the Rule 26(f) conference.
MeetandConfer.com, provided by 26F LLC, was created to help attorneys prepare for court mandated “meet and confer” meetings. The application is designed for law firms and corporate clients to help them determine the content, scope, and extent of ESI associated with the case. There are four modules to coordinate the process, as follows:
- Manage Enterprise Information: Enables users to map out organizational information, allowing all parties to understand where potentially relevant ESI is located, policies and practices associated with the ESI, and who is responsible for the ESI. This module also enables various aspects of the organization to be documented, including backup policies and disaster recovery plans.
- Matter Scoping: Enables users to track the various matters, and, for each matter, it enables users to track custodians and generate surveys to gather information about the locations of potentially responsive ESI.
- Meet and Confer: Allows attorneys to define essential ESI needs for both parties while projecting a budget to identify, collect and process the data. This module also provides a mechanism for computer-aided video conferencing (which can be facilitated by an independent mediator) to actually conduct the conference.
- System Administration: Supports the creation of clients and users and establish rights for each user group.
Sean’s article mentioned above goes into more detail into each module, reflecting his “hands on” experience in “test driving” the application. MeetandConfer.com is offering a free one month trial to “qualified” users (i.e., attorneys and judges), with the monthly rate of $149 per user to be billed after the free trial.
So, what do you think? Would an application like this make it easier to fully prepare for “meet and confer” conferences? Would you consider using such an application? Please share any comments you might have or if you'd like to know more about a particular topic.