About the conference

“I could teach only so many students, but a conference could reach far more people.”

When I started teaching e-discovery at UF in 2008, I viewed it as a survival course. The traditional apprenticeship model had been reversed: my students often graduated knowing more about e-discovery than the firms that hired them. That inversion sparked the idea for the conference.

The idea grew out of several converging experiences, beginning with my own practice. In 1996, I designed and launched Holland & Knight’s website at hklaw.com (opens in a new tab). My practice later evolved into class action defense in the telecommunications industry, so I was doing what we now call e-discovery in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the field even had a name.

Around 2005, Holland & Knight asked me to develop a three-month luncheon series to teach the firm’s lawyers e-discovery. It struck me that no one was teaching e-discovery to law students at UF, and most of them would not join firms with in-house programs like the one I had built. So I began teaching at UF as an adjunct in 2008, a position I held while maintaining a full-time litigation practice. It was the start of 10 years of driving to Gainesville every Monday during the semester to teach e-discovery as an adjunct.

By 2012, things had not dramatically improved despite the impact of important case law and the work of the Sedona Conference and EDRM. It is hard now to remember how low the level of competence was. I repeatedly saw attorneys and paralegals who believed that what appeared on the screen was something stored inside the computer, like a page in a file cabinet, rather than a rendering that software assembled on demand from digital files, ultimately strings of ones and zeros interpreted by applications. The information container had changed, and many lawyers had not noticed. Judges were left to referee disputes between attorneys who did not understand that the game had changed.

The rules of civil procedure were written for paper, and judges and lawyers, especially in state courts, were still trying to shoehorn this new kind of information into them. Very few knew how to do it in a practical way. The results were serious mistakes, errors, and too often, game-playing, because a lawyer who understood the technology could exploit an opponent or a judge who didn’t. In the years after Zubulake, attorneys handled e-discovery willy-nilly and learned as best they could on the fly.

I could teach only so many students, but a conference could reach far more people. I was also concerned that judges and government attorneys had almost no practical educational resources. So I developed the idea of a conference as a public service to raise e-discovery competence outside the classroom, providing practical takeaways that attendees could use the day after the conference.

We decided it should be hosted by a trusted educational institution with no financial interest in the outcome, a deliberate choice in a field crowded with vendor-sponsored events. No pay-to-play or self-promotion in any of the conference sessions. From the start, we also knew the conference’s reach had to extend beyond campus, so we began experimenting with innovative ways to reach and involve what we now call “online” audiences.

I also wanted the conference to be broad and to include all the players: e-discovery technicians, e-discovery professionals, paralegals, and attorneys. The goal was a common, basic understanding that would enable firms to talk among themselves, with their clients, and with the courts. Attorneys feared software and data, and even as late as 2012, that fear remained a major obstacle. We needed to make attorneys and paralegals comfortable working with the technology.

The approach was deliberately practical. The work of organizations such as the Sedona Conference and EDRM was valuable, but it was not reaching every practitioner. We wanted to bring the entire industry together to build shared understanding and skills.

The response was immediate, and the conference quickly became a success. The industry jumped in. Volunteers came from the judicial system, think tanks, law firms, and vendors, all eager to help. Everyone volunteered, and the University hosted the conference as a public service. That outpouring confirmed that the need was real and that the whole community wanted a place to meet on neutral ground.