When I first saw that Jason Baron, a man of boundless energy and rapid-fire humor, was putting together a full day on the future of search in e-discovery, I wondered if he could pull it off. A whole day? I should never have doubted Jason, who in his real life is the Director of Litigation in the Office of the General Counsel of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Pulling in such heavy hitters as Judges Paul Grimm and Andrew Peck, Craig Ball, Ralph Losey and Patrick Oot was a feat in itself. The facilities at Capital One were first-class as was the food and hospitality. We got CLE credit and the whole thing was free. Hard to beat any of that, but the education component set a very high bar for future conferences. It was with the greatest reluctance that John and I dragged ourselves away in the afternoon to teach a CLE on courtroom technology in one of the high tech courtrooms of Fairfax Circuit Court.
We were thoroughly captivated by the opening multimedia presentation, a "Did You Know?" movie that is still in draft form (though it looked doggone good), which will premiere in its final form at LegalTech in New York this coming February. Concocted by Ralph and Jason, it had lots of thought-provoking data:
Cost to store 1G in 1956: $2 million
Cost to store 1G in 2009: Less than $1.00
Average lawyer now receives approximately 100 e-mails per day
% of relevant data found by keyword searching: 20%
% of relevant data lawyers thought they had found: 75%
How much data will exist in 2011? 2 zettabytes (a zettabyte equals one billion terrabytes)
Accompanied by the music of Durude's Sandstorm, nuggets like these (and I couldn't write fast enough to capture a quarter of them) intermingled with imagery, dazzling both the mind and the eye.
More on this conference tomorrow - I just can't bring myself to make my posts as long as Ralph's (grinning).
E-mail: snelson@senseient.com Phone: 703-359-0700
