eDiscovery Daily Blog

Yes, It’s Another Story About Coronavirus: eDiscovery and World Trends

If you’re not sick from COVID-19 (aka, the Coronavirus), you’re probably sick of hearing about COVID-19.  Hopefully, the latter group will indefinitely continue to be much larger than the former group.  Regardless, I won’t bore you with what you already know about COVID-19 and how it has disrupted (and will continue to disrupt) our way of life (well, I won’t bore you much anyway).  But, since this is an eDiscovery blog, let’s talk about how it is already starting to impact our industry.  And, we’ll also talk about what CloudNine is doing about it.

With social distancing taking hold, schools closing, theme parks closing, college and professional sports leagues closing, Broadway going dark and so much more as part of the CDC warning against events of more than 50 people, life is definitely different around the world in the wake of COVID-19, with circumstances evolving continually.  Even Forrest Gump has it.  Many companies in our space have moved much of their workers to work at home status (including CloudNine, more on that below).  Here are just a few impacts in the eDiscovery and legal technology world:

  • The University of Florida E-Discovery Conference that was scheduled for this Thursday, March 19 in Gainesville, FL (and via Livestream) has been postponed. Bill Hamilton, who is a University of Florida Levin College of Law Skills Professor and has organized the conference since its inception, made the announcement “with great disappointment” and U-Fla opted to postpone the conference instead of holding it entirely online.  Those of us who attend in person every year and enjoy the collaboration and interaction with other professionals in our industry can appreciate that decision and, hopefully, the conference can be re-scheduled later this year.
  • The EDRM Summit/Workshop for June has been converted to a “innovative, inter-active virtual conference this June 25-26 instead of the live-in person at the Duke University campus”. As announced by Mary Mack and Kaylee Walstad last week, doing so “will allow everyone, regardless of geography or health status, to participate, and will save participants travel time and money- it can truly be a global experience, for attendees, speakers and sponsors.”
  • And, yesterday, ILTA decided to postpone all in-person events through April 30. As they stated in an announcement yesterday, “ILTA will continue monitoring the global COVID-19 situation and evaluate our decision in the coming weeks.”  So, no change to the annual ILTACON conference in August – yet.

So, that leaves many of us to exercise our Business Continuity plans and perform our duties remotely.  And conduct our meetings via one of several teleconference services out there.  One of the more popular services out there is Zoom (which also happens to be the underlying service for RingCentral, which we use).  Leave it to Craig Ball, who has “taught classes with Zoom for years” to provide a Zoom “cheat sheet” for those who will be using it extensively over the next few weeks.  :o)

Speaking of Business Continuity plans, CloudNine has exercised ours and (as we announced to our customers and partners yesterday) most of our employees are working from home during this challenging time to do our part to minimize the spread of the virus (including me).  This isn’t the first time we’ve had to exercise our Business Continuity plan – we also did so when Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area in 2017.  Back then, even though our Houston headquarters weren’t flooded, many roads leading to them were, so we instructed our employees to work from home for a week after Houston was hit by the storm.  Despite that, it was business as usual and we were able to continue to provide services and support to our customers and continue to host customer data without interruption in our data center.  So, we fully expect to be able to continue to provide the full range of services and high-quality support you have come to expect, just like we did back then (including this blog).  We’re here for you.

Stay healthy out there!

So, what do you think?  How has COVID-19 impacted you and your way of life?  As always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

P.S. — We haven’t forgotten that it’s St. Patrick’s Day today.  Hope you have as much fun as this guy (despite the circumstances)…

Sponsor: This blog is sponsored by CloudNine, which is a data and legal discovery technology company with proven expertise in simplifying and automating the discovery of data for audits, investigations, and litigation. Used by legal and business customers worldwide including more than 50 of the top 250 Am Law firms and many of the world’s leading corporations, CloudNine’s eDiscovery automation software and services help customers gain insight and intelligence on electronic data.

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.

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