eDiscovery Daily Blog

• March 18, 2015

Though I write a daily blog, believe it or not, I do have a “day job”. I’m Vice President of Professional Services at CloudNine, and I also coordinate our marketing and software rollouts. Sometimes, I’m able to write my blog post during the work day; other times, I have to wait until the evening to do so, possibly as late as 8 or 9 PM, depending on my workload for that day. When blogging interferes with your “day job”, it can be difficult to do both.

I’m not sure that this was directly stated, but this conflict between day job and blogging may have been a factor in the discontinuation of IT-Lex last year and the scaling back of Ralph Losey’s excellent e-Discovery Team® blog from weekly to monthly a few weeks ago. It’s not always easy to keep a blog going when you have a busy career too.

In her excellent blog Litigation Support Guru, Amy Bowser-Rollins (see our profile of her from last year here) wrestled with that very dilemma. As she noted in her most recent post I Quit My Litigation Support Job, she has juggled four “jobs”, including: 1) Working full-time in a litigation support role at a law firm in Washington DC, 2) Working in a management position for a non-profit called Women in eDiscovery, 3) Teaching several courses in the Georgetown University Paralegal Studies program, and 4) Mentoring individuals interested in a litigation support career through her Litigation Support Guru blog.

As you can imagine, it was a struggle for Amy to do it all. Anyone can tell you that litigation support is a full-time job that can, at times, involve evening and weekend work. Not to mention that she was also dealing with a three hour daily commute to and from Washington DC. Though she noted that her work on the blog was most fulfilling (“I love helping others realize their dreams. I love mentoring others.”), her day job (and commute) was cutting into time to mentor others.

So, she quit her day job.

After having taken a sabbatical back in 2005, Amy decided to take another one now from her litigation support job. More power to her and, hopefully, that means more excellent blog posts to come!

As for me, last week was especially busy. I provided consulting assistance in different projects to clients ranging from search best practices to retrieve particular documents to review, de-duplication of potentially privileged documents in order to prepare a privilege log and identification of previously reviewed and classified documents in one collection to exclude them from review in another collection (to save review costs and ensure consistency). I managed to do all of that in four days, as I was off Friday for my birthday. 🙂 It’s not always easy, though, to attend to my day job and keep up with the blog.

When my boss at CloudNine approached me with a completed design and URL for our blog (which, of course, was called eDiscovery Daily), I initially balked at the idea of doing a daily blog. As you can imagine, I was a bit daunted by the effort involved of having to identify and write about different topics four to five days per week. Ultimately, nearly four and a half years later, it has proven to be personally rewarding for me as it forces me to keep up to date on trends and key case law in the industry (efforts which would otherwise go languishing when client projects heat up). And, my “day job” has also enabled me to share some of my experiences to you through best practices that I’ve learned through actual experiences with clients. I hope you have found our blog to be as useful as I have found it rewarding to write and I plan to continue to write it (and keep my “day job”) as long as I can.

I’m not going to go so far as to say “hug a blogger today”, but I think it’s important to recognize that most of them do this in their spare time, aside from their “day job”. I, for one, am grateful to all that do so in legal technology.

So, what do you think? Which blogs do you read? 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. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.