The 5th Paraben Forensic Innovation Conference was held at the Zermatt Resort in Midway, Utah on November 3rd to 6th, 2012.
The event was a tour-de-force in education, showcasing multiple forensic and eDiscovery boot camps. I had the honor of coordinating the eDiscovery and Deposition boot camps.
Our eDiscovery speakers included my blogging partner Jessica Mederson, Esq., from The Legal Geeks and Hansen Reynolds Dickinson Crueger LLC; Stephanie Sparks, Esq., from Hoge Fenton; and Mike Gutierrez, Director of Digital Forensics at Orange Legal Technology.
The Boot camp was a multiple level approach, starting with an eDiscovery Overview, followed by a discussion on eDiscovery technology, and then putting the technology and the law into practice.
We also had the talents and insight of New York State Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr and Federal District Court Judge David Nuffer, who shared their views on social media, proportionality, the duty of competency and analyzed a hypothetical auto-accident case for eDiscovery issues.
Greg Kipper, futurist and author of Augmented Reality: An Emerging Technologies Guide to AR, gave an engaging keynote address on innovation, augmented reality and its impact on digital forensics. Greg also offered insights on future innovations designed to help attendees manage their careers.
Greg covered amazing issues with self-driving cars incorporating social networking technology, augmented reality and cross-boarder cloud storage. All of these will have significant eDiscovery and forensic issues, plus the prediction that there will 50 billion Internet enabled devices by 2020. That is seven devices per person on Earth.
The conference sessions also focused on social media admissibility issues, privacy rights, review methodologies and other timely eDiscovery topics.
Judge Sciarrino and Stephanie Sparks had an excellent session on requesting social media information and admissibility. They reviewed the Stored Communication Act and differences between seeking public/private information. Ms. Sparks addressed third-party requests to ISP’s, which are prohibited from disclosing content under the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. §2701, et seq., but must comply with a subpoena to the extent it seeks “record[s] or other information pertaining to a subscriber to or customer of such service” under 18 U.S.C. §2702(c)(6).)
I presented multiple times on eDiscovery, but my last presentation was Geeks & Lawyers: You Can’t Handle the Truth. The material was a break from eDiscovery, focusing on legal issues in comic books, science fiction and many issues discussed on The Legal Geeks. I was pleased with the audience’s reaction and participation as we discussed assumption of risk and wearing a Red Shirt in Star Trek.
Jessica Mederson and I also had two “Fireside Chats” with Judge Sciarrino for The Legal Geeks’ YouTube Channel and Podcasts. Below please find our second chat, where we discussed the 2012 World Series and a little baseball history.
PFIC 2012 was a great success and I look forward to 2013. My compliments to Paraben for hosting another successful event and I appreciated everyone who volunteered their time to speak at the conference.