Extract from Doug Austin’s article “Mary Mack of ACEDS: eDiscovery Trends 2018” posted in CloudNine’s eDiscovery Daily Blog
This is the second of the 2018 Legaltech New York (LTNY) Thought Leader Interview series. eDiscovery Daily interviewed several thought leaders at LTNY this year (and some afterward) to get their observations regarding trends at the show and generally within the eDiscovery industry.
Today’s thought leader is Mary Mack of ACEDS. Mary is the Executive Director of the Association of Certified eDiscovery Specialists (ACEDS). E-discovery luminary and recipient of the Masters Conference Educator of the Year 2016, Mary provides ACEDS and its membership more than a decade of strong credibility and sound leadership within the e-discovery community. Mary is the author of A Process of Illumination: The Practical Guide to Electronic Discovery, considered by many to be the first popular book on e-discovery. She is the co-editor of the Thomson Reuters West treatise, eDiscovery for Corporate Counsel.
What have your impressions of LTNY been this year?
{Interviewed Mary the last morning of the conference}
We’re on the downhill slide today and I’m so happy – these shows are a lot of fun, but a lot of work too. A highlight for me was the gathering of our NYC chapter attendees followed by our annual #DrinksWithDougAndMary community happy hour at Ruth’s Chris, sponsored by our fantastic affiliates CloudNine and Compliance Discovery Solutions. Thank you so much for that! It was packed from 4pm on with everyone representing from the Hon. Judge Peck to our newest CEDS certified person. The other thing that was fun was that our other chapter leadership was in attendance and our chapters look forward to this event every year.
Another highlight for me was the number of great people taking #eDiscoveryRockstar selfies at our booth behind our big backdrop!
I was on a session yesterday with David Horrigan, Bill Hamilton, Dan Katz, Laura Norris and Judge Rodriguez, which was fabulous. I thought it was well attended and the audience was a very mixed group. At the end, the panel asked for predictions and then we had buzzers where we could agree with the predictions, so it was like a round robin prediction. My prediction was The Rise of the Legal Engineer, which (I think) got three “yes” votes and one “no” vote from the other panelists. Then, after the session was over, one of the attendees came up to me from Airbus with his name tag which indicated that he is a legal engineer. I decided he had come from the future and they had figured that all out already!
That was a nice session and I’m glad I got to participate in it. Other than that, this is (unfortunately for me) a business conference, so I’m not able to see as much content as I’d like to, session wise. I’m going to have to depend on the recorded versions. There were some very nice keynotes, I heard, so I look forward to checking those out particularly.
