I was sitting around the other day talking about eDiscovery with Craig Ball …. and I know what you’re thinking, “wait a minute, these two guys live in New Orleans. It’s 40 below zero and snowing all over the country and they’ve got sunshine, Mardi Gras, St. Patricks Day, Super Sunday with the Mardi Gras Indians, music, it’s crawfish season and Shaggy the Crawfish King is boiling all over town but these two guys are sitting around talking eDiscovery. What a couple of losers!
But no Constant Reader (sorry Big Steve. I’ve wanted to use that phrase for years now) it’s all about you. Craig and I are constantly thinking about what we can do to enrich your lives and enhance your professional experience. And we really didn’t want to fire up the USS Zydecoldsmobile and drive to Beaux Bridge for the Pirouge Festival.
So we got to talking about eDiscovery solutions for small firms and I brought up Office 365 and the Law of Unintended Consequences. Microsoft wasn’t really thinking about all the solo attorneys and small firms out there when they bought Equivio and started fleshing out a robust set of eDiscovery ECA features in Office 365. But if it’s in there for the big firms, well it’s in there for all the rest of us too.
And what better way to talk about it (and irritate all the grammar Puritans out there by starting a sentence with “AND”) then an extended discussion with Rachi Messing of Microsoft. Many of you know Rachi as the Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Legal but other may recall him as the VP of Customer Solutions at Equivio before it was acquired by the Big M. Probably know of you will recognize him from the picture on his LinkedIn profile unless you went to high school with him. Seriously, I think he was the third student from the left in the back booth in the first scene of Diner.
But Rachi knows his Office 365 and after a chance meeting with Judge Xavier Rodriguez at LegalTech New York in January, he graciously agreed to do a series of videos on the subject for His Honor to use in a course he teaches at St. Marys Law School. And despite the fact that I recently referred to him as judge from El Paso (showing how much I know about geography in general and Texas in particular) Judge Rodriguez was equally gracious in saying we should share the videos with the rest of the world via the Interweb. He didn’t actually say that of course, that’s me being a wiesenheimer becasue like my fictional counterpart Spenser (the detective not the poet) sometimes I just cant help myself.
This first video is the introduction to our series and gives a good overview of how we are going to proceed. We expect to do 7 or 8 recordings and release them every other week for the next few months. Which will give Judge Rodriguez plenty of time before the fall semester to totally disassociate himself from us and our ramblings if necessary. Take a look. I hope you like it.
And as always, my undying thanks to Gayle for maintaining the eDiscovery Channel library.
Oh yeah, since it is New Orleans where I’m writing this, I just couldn’t leave without one more from the man Eric Clapton called “the greatest guitarist you never heard of.” Take it away Sonny. Bon temps roulez.
