April 9, 2009 CLE on “Searching through e-Discovery”

Greg Buckles and I had a great CLE webinar on April 9, 2009 for the State Bar of Texas Paralegal Division.  This was PD’s first CLE webinar for paralegals.  I have been serving as the District CLE Chair for the Paralegal Division of the State Bar of Texas this past year.  I have been looking forward to presenting a CLE Webinar to the members of the Texas State Bar Paralegal Division before my term ends in June 2009, and I was delighted that 168 Texas Paralegal members attended throughout the State. 

I asked Greg Buckles, a forensic and electronic discovery expert in Houston, to co-present the CLE with me, and fortunately for us, Greg agreed, and he gave us a fantastic presentation.  Greg spent most of last year serving on the new EDRM Search Metric Committee, and so he was able to bring us some valuable information from the EDRM Search Metric that paralegals can use to search through electronic discovery. 

What I learned in preparing for the CLE is that our courts are weighing heavily on the side of demanding accountability from the users who conduct searches of electronic discovery.  There is even a decision from the Southern District of Texas indicating that sanctions will be handed out in the future if firms continue to negligently entrust searching electronic discovery to untrained attorneys or paralegals — or litigation support personnel for that matter. 

For myself, I believe search will be THE hot issue for the coming decade.  Therefore, I was grateful for the opportunity to present an introduction of this important issue to the Texas paralegal community.  Paralegals everywhere can certainly add search techniques to their skill sets.  After all, paralegals work with evidence every day as well as working closely with their attorneys and clients. 

I hope that we inspired a few paralegals to go forward in their careers with this training in search methodology and best practices.  AIIM.org has a certification module on Information Organization, Access & Search that is well worth the time and effort.  AIIM also offers this certification program as an internet module, and their classroom session will be coming to Houston later in 2009, which I plan to attend and become certified in search.  But everyone can study search on the EDRM.net website as well as through other resources available on the internet.  I think ALSP is looking into offering a search certification as well, but I’m not sure about that.  It would be good if they would bring this to the litigation support community.

Being able to conduct proper search techniques is something that can be taught, and both paralegals and litigation support personnel can certainly achieve a core competency of utilizing legally defensible best practices when searching through electronic discovery.

Julie Wade
April 14, 2009

p.s.  A copy of the powerpoint slide can be obtained at http://www.reason-ed.com/Reason-eD/?CFID=19016163&CFTOKEN=53761687 or on my Linked-In page http://www.linkedin.com/in/juliewade