Ride the Lightning

Jason Baron on Computer-Assisted Review – Bravo!

June 20, 2012

It is always worth listening to my friend Jason Baron, who is well known to anyone in the e-discovery field. He recently gave a keynote speech for the Seventh Circuit Electronic Discovery Workshop on Computer-Assisted Review. Ralph Losey, who loves "CAR" as the acronym for this technology, must surely have been pleased by the title.

Ralph was good enough to post the keynote on his blog. As always with Jason, it's a complicated ride, zig-zagging from Goddard's rockets to cutthroat monopoly to the U.S.S. Enterprise to "Go Fish."  Jason is never boring.

He asks many questions about "CAR" and provides illumination into some of the answers, being wise enough to know that we have many more questions than answers about CAR, which is still in its infancy. I particularly liked his quote from Albert Einstein, which I had never heard: "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." There has certainly been a lot hubris in the EDD world and no doubt the gods continue to chortle daily.

I was pleased to read that Jason is working, along with a number of other groups, toward forming an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) accredited workgroup aimed at codifying an e-discovery quality standard or code of practice for the purposes of audits.

When I got to the end of the post, I smiled to see the first comment was from Craig Ball who said, "Wonderful speech! Really hits the mark throughout." Since I can't say it better than that, I'll simply say "Ditto."