Be nice to your children
On a lighter note, take a look at DoNotVoteforMyDad.com to see why we all need to stay on good terms with our children.
The blog is apparently the work of the daughter and son-in-law of an Oklahoma lawyer who is running for District Judge. NBC did a nice video on the story.
488,724 hits as of today on the blog. Someone is paying attention.
More on Electronic Discovery in California
I got some nice feedback from my talk on the California Electronic Discovery Act for the Ventura County Bar Association Business Litigation Section last week. Thanks to Hon. Glen Reiser for providing his cogent comments of how ESI discovery is viewed from the bench, and Erik B. Feingold and Charmaine Buehner for setting up to the program (and buying me lunch!).
Usually when I speak to bar groups I do a comprehensive powerpoint presentation detailing lists of rules, citations and all that regular technical stuff that lawyers love.
This time, I thought I would apply a technique that we’ve bandied about at Loyola Law School’s Advanced Trial Skills Institute and use single card key graphics to illustrate my primary points. For fun, I used photos from a recent family trip to Europe. You can view the presentation here.
To take the place of a handout, I uploaded a wiki post on OpenSourceLawForum.com with links to the key source material. After the talk, I added two cases mentioned by Judge Reiser and an article from one of the attendees who was kind enough to send me an email note. Check out the article here.
The feedback I received was positive. Erik wrote: ”I received nothing but rave reviews and I thought the presentation was light but very informative.” Charmaine wrote: ”[T]hank you for a memorable presentation, which one member summed up as being one of the Section’s best.”
I hope they invite me back, a fun group I’d like to get to know better. Also, it is gratifying that the cutting edge communication techniques we are studying are helping us be better legal communicators.
More on the Electronic Discovery Act
I am on my way to Ventura to speak about the Electronic Discovery Act (AB 5), a new set of California statutes (with some amendments to some older ones), that is designed to bring discovery in State court into the 21st Century.
I have to confess, I hadn’t even realized California updates its electronic discovery law until I got a call from the Ventura Country Bar Association to talk about the subject. Up until now, I’ve done most of my electronic discovery in Federal court, and the rules there have been in place for some time (plus you get a magistrate judge to help speed the process along).
I’ve annotated AB 5 to show the changes in the law (see OpenSourceLawForum.org for the entry), so I won’t repeat that here.
We’ll see how the talk goes. I am looking forward to hearing what the group has to say about electronic discovery in general. Personally, I believe that if you don’t know how to discover data from computer systems, you’re working with one hand tied behind your back.
