My Dear eDiscovery Community,
It’s Spring already, although the snowbound might call it Sprinter. LegalTech has come and gone, and the last #GoGator from the University of Florida’s Frederic G Levin College of Law is fading into the sunset.
ACEDS is growing thanks to the wonderful work of our chapter leaders, our faculty and affiliates and most of all, our CEDS. A couple years ago, we were losing more members and CEDS than we were gaining. That trend has been totally reversed, and our net members and CEDS are on a very healthy upward trajectory.
Our chapters are putting on programs as varied as deep dives into TAR, the emerging ISO standard for eDiscovery, Security and CEDS study groups. Our members, like Charter Advisory Board President Al Lindsay and Charter Board Member Mike Simon, are penning law review articles on emerging topics like AI and self regulation of our legal profession.
ACEDS, with our chapters and affiliates, have held judicial panels at LegalTech (with the Honorable Federal Judges Rodriguez, Francis and Waxse sponsored by Thomson Reuters), and at Cardozo Law School with newly retired Judges Peck and Francis, honored by former Judges Hedges and Maas and sponsored by Relativity.
Our new partnerships forged this quarter include High Performance Counsel (@HipCounsel) and the MER conference. We’re deepening our relationships with our existing partners and affiliates,
We’ll be surveying you very soon about your desire and enthusiasm for an international gathering of CEDS and friends—formerly known as the National ACEDS conference. We’ve been and are focusing on supporting our chapters and affinity partners this year. BARBRI, our generous corporate parent, is willing to consider our own conference again if enough of us ask. We look forward and thank you for sharing your thoughts on this.
Speaking of surveys: with the General Data Protection Regulation coming into effect May 25, ACEDS will be revamping our data collection. We do not have a Facebook page, in part because of the work we do with you. We want to track what you would like us to track, for example, which webinars you attend so you can easily generate a CEDS credit report. We’ll be sending you communications to opt in, rather than opt out. Over the course of the year, even non-EU citizens will have their data treated in a GDPR way.
We’ve launched our blog, the eDiscovery Voice, with the help of our community and have syndicated the content with JD Supra. ACEDS broke out of the eDiscovery bubble with an article on AI and the law sourced by USA Today and Media Planet. We’re trading memes with State Bar Associations.
We are engaging with our community at live events, educational and networking, and on Twitter and LinkedIn. The LinkedIn Group is gaining hundreds of members per month and TwitterChats #ACEDSTC are becoming a monthly event. @KayleeWalstad’s LiveStreams of events are helping spread the CEDS gospel. So far this year, we have held several intimate Guild dinners and larger Happy Hours in NYC, the University of Florida and Jacksonville. We’ll be part of CLOC in Las Vegas, the Detroit Chapter’s regional Symposium in October, Exterro’s User Conference, the Masters Chicago and RelativityFest London. We’ve fielded invitations to speak as far away as Brazil and China, and plan an Australian chapter launch this year.
We’ll be at CLOC in Las Vegas next week in booth 107, and wearing our ACEDS Ambassador buttons. We rolled this out for LegalTech to make sure new entrants and attendees (as well as shy people) feel welcomed by our ACEDS Ambassadors.
Finally, in this era of consolidation and inflection, we are looking for better ways to support you, our wonderful community. Look for our offerings on team training, a tighter connection to platform and tool based certification, and more reciprocal credits with other certifications. Our members in transition and hardship programs have supported over a dozen people in 2018 to gain and maintain certificates, certification and membership. We’ve held Ask the Expert sessions and private consultations to move our CEDS, members and hiring managers forward.
As always, please email [email protected] with commercial questions, [email protected] to get involved with your local chapter or say hello on social media or via email.
Our community is blossoming, and we are honored to cultivate our shared success.
With deep respect,
Mary Mack, CEDS, CIAM, CISSP
Executive Director, ACEDS
@mackmary
