eDiscovery Daily Blog
Richard G. Braman: 1953 – 2014
I learned from Ralph Losey’s excellent blog, e-Discovery Team ®, that Richard Braman, the Founder and Executive Director Emeritus of The Sedona Conference®, passed away on Monday after battling an extended illness. He was only 60 years old.
For those of you who don’t know, The Sedona Conference® (TSC) is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) research and educational institute dedicated to the advanced study of law and policy in the areas of antitrust law, complex litigation, and intellectual property rights. The mission of TSC is to drive the reasoned and just advancement of law and policy by stimulating ongoing dialogue amongst leaders of the bench and bar to achieve consensus on tipping point issues. Richard founded the TSC in 1997 and its impact on the legal world and electronic discovery has been enormous.
Another of Ralph’s posts from a couple of years ago provides a lot of insight about TSC and Richard, as well. In the post, with regard to electronic discovery, Ralph provides a list of 35 publications that TSC’s Working Group 1 on Electronic Document Retention and Production had (at the time) generated since 2003. All of these publications are free from the TSC website!
That’s the number of publications just for one working group – there are nine(!) other working groups in TSC, related to everything from The Role of Economics in Antitrust to Intersection of the Patent and Antitrust Laws and Mass Torts and Punitive Damages. You start to really get a sense of the enormous impact that TSC has had on the legal profession.
Richard is one of the “true American heroes” that Joe Looby references in his documentary The Decade of Discovery that is set to be shown at the Manhattan Film Festival next Saturday (June 21) for their contributions to the tremendous progress made over the past decade in eDiscovery practice. In 2013, he was named by The American Lawyer as “one of the 50 most innovative people in Big Law in the last 50 years.”
Richard’s legacy will live on indefinitely through TSC and those of us in the legal industry, attorneys and technologists alike, have benefitted greatly from his influence. The In Memoriam page on the TSC site can be found here, with two video clips of Richard from The Decade of Discovery. His obituary and information on his memorial service can be found here.
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