Hi, What's Next readers. I'm Zach Warren, editor-in-chief of Legaltech News and your guest writer for the day with all the things you need to know going into one of the biggest events on any legal technologist's calendar: Legalweek New York. The action kicks off on Jan. 29, and there's no better place to be if you're looking to learn what's making waves at the intersection of law and technology. In my experience, the best Legalweek plans are a mish-mash of networking, demos and educational tracks. Read on for a rundown of the topics I'm watching.

We'll be back with a special edition of What's Next on Feb. 1 that's jam-packed with takeaways from Law.com's team at the event. If you're headed to Legalweek, let me know what you'll be watching at [email protected].

Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Laporte of the Northern District of California.
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Judges and the Future of E-Discovery

The opening keynote with former U.S. Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales and Loretta Lynch is going to (understandably) get a lot of hype, but for the tech crowd, the keynote I'm most excited for is Wednesday afternoon's judges panel. Past panels have focused primarily on e-discovery in civil litigation, particularly after the FRCP amendments of 2015. I'm expecting the judges to have a slightly different focus on privacy and data management this year, spurred in no small part by the SCOTUSCarpenter decision and GDPR.

The panel has a few names that stand out to the casual e-discovery watcher, such as Shook Hardy partner Patrick Oot and retired Southern District of New York Judge Andrew Peck, but there are some other key people to watch for as well.

Joy Flowers Conti, senior judge in the Western District of Pennsylvania, has recently become one of the foremost prognosticators on the future of e-discovery with her appearances on a number of webcasts and conferences. A veteran of last year's Legalweek panel, Conti has authored pieces on e-discovery ethics and law, and discussed topics such as cost recovery and the scope of e-discovery.

Elizabeth Laporte of the Northern District of California, meanwhile, brings the rules perspective as a judicial observer for the Sedona Conference Working Group on Electronic Document Retention and Production, and a former member of the Federal Circuit's Bench & Bar E-Discovery Committee. There aren't many people more qualified to offer a prediction about how the practice of discovery may change in the next few years. Then there's Kimberly Priest Johnson, magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Texas. She's the group's newcomer—appointed to the bench in 2016—but the fresh perspective is something I feel these panels in recent years have lacked. She's previously spoken on an Electronic Discovery Institute panel on preservation of ESI and signed on as a judicial endorser of the Sedona Conference's cooperation proclamation.

All told, it's a dynamic panel that should offer something new. Plus, there's something to be said about an afternoon session. Oot promised me the panel will be a bit looser and more playful than panels in the past. You have to do something right before cocktail hour.

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A Model Citizen

One legal technologist made the analogy for me last year: The Zubulake rulings that started in 2003 were to e-discovery as GDPR is to information governance.That is, just as e-discovery rose in the mid-20000s into a more streamlined force, GDPR has forced law firms and legal departments to go beyond throwing software at the privacy problem and actually institute formalized information governance plans.

A number of Legalweek sessions tackle how to get started on implementation, and one on the last day talks about the single piece of legislation that intrigues me the most for 2019: the California Consumer Privacy Act. With the subtitle “The Big Tail Wagging the U.S.,” John Isaza of Rimon, P.C. and Jeff Beard of the International Association of Privacy Professionals are planning a deep dive into how GDPR might not just be a European phenomenon, which could set off alarms for attorneys who haven't thought much about privacy.

The other session that stands out falls on the first day, and is helpfully titled “The Government Reference Model.” That session has Allison Stanton of the U.S. Department of Justice and Glenn Melcher of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau joining Morgan Lewis' Scott Milner and moderator David Greenwald of Jenner & Block to make a sensical roadmap of how to comply with government investigations. It's surprisingly not something that's been codified yet.

“The idea was to create something like the EDRM model for e-discovery to provide a single document that would enable a discussion with anyone involved with an internal investigation, on the government side or corporate side,” Greenwald told Legaltech News earlier in January. He added the report provides the “overall process to the parties so you could see the overall map of where you are starting and going and all the workstreams involved.”

There are a few other sessions that will explore these lines as well: “GDPR 8 Months Later: Trends in Litigation and Regulation” and “The Golden Age of Contractual Insight and Innovation is Near: But First, You Need a Universal Data Model” are two other items that jump out.

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More Than Just Legaltech

Remember when I said Legaltech was renamed Legalweek a few years ago? There's a reason for that. These days, Legaltech is just one of five conferences that comprise the whole week of, well, Legalweek. It also includes a Business of Law forum, LegalCIO, LegalMarketing, and the LegalDiversity and Talent Management forum. There are also a few workshops the day before the official opening of the exhibit hall Tuesday morning.

For the tech-savvy among us, LegalCIO and the workshops provide the best opportunities to learn how new technologies (at least to those in the legal field) will be implemented for attorneys. At LegalCIO, Day One has conversations about practical applications for blockchain, artificial intelligence and data analytics, while day two deals with security crisis management, alternative legal services and the tech competition between small and large firms. AKA: pretty much every topic that legal technologists have chatted about over the past two years, wrapped into two days from a number of law firm panelists.

But for a deeper dive into the tech, that's where the workshops come in. Now in their second year, the Monday workshops cover three tech topics: artificial intelligence, blockchain and competitive intelligence. They're intended to start out at a high level for the newcomers, but get progressively more in the weeds as the day rolls on. The final two hours of the AI and blockchain workshops, for instance, are all about the regulations and ethical quandaries surrounding the technologies, while the competitive intelligence workshop ends with a case study.

Both sets of sessions are probably more for the technologists than the litigators among us, but those lines seem to be increasingly blurred. Especially for attorneys advocating for a way to close the gap between those with resources and those without in litigation, using these new technologies effectively might be the answer.

“We are pricing people out of justice. And that should be absolutely terrifying to all of you,” said Aaron Crews, chief data analytics officer at Littler, at last year's AI Bootcamp workshop. “The ability to take people to court is what keeps people from shooting at each other. … Now, I can take a case where it previously wouldn't have been cost-effective to do so. That's monumental.”

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On the Radar:

Dentons Lawyer Wired $2.5 Million to Scam Bank Account in Elaborate Con