e-discovery 2.0

Regular readers of E-Discovery 2.0 will notice a new look to the blog today (thanks Sean!). But that’s not the biggest change. As we enter the blog’s second year, I have decided to take your feedback to heart and invite 3 exceptional people to join me as regular bloggers.

In the 12½ months since I wrote my first post, it has been exciting to see the blog’s readership grow rapidly (see charts for trends in page views and email subscribers). I would like to profoundly thank everyone who has either read this blog, linked to it, submitted comments, or even just come up to me at various parties and events to say that you have been reading it. Without your input, I would have nothing to write. It is tremendous fun to interact with a community of people who share my interests, and I’m grateful to you all for engaging.

As part of my ongoing dialogue with readers, I consistently got 2 requests: can you post more often, and cover a broader set of e-discovery issues? True, over the past year, I have covered the big deals that mattered, the small ones that didn’t and the ones in between; I wrote about analyst rankings of different e-discovery vendors, prompting a lively discussion involving the analysts themselves; I highlighted shifts in the landscape, such as enterprises bringing e-discovery in-house, partnerships with archive vendors, and the changing role of service providers. I even had a little fun, every now and then.

But there’s no denying that e-discovery presents far too rich a set of legal, business, and technology issues than I can cover alone – especially given the demands of my day job. That’s why I decided that the best way to develop the blog as a resource for the e-discovery community is to have more people writing, especially if those people are both more intelligent than me and have their own perspectives on e-discovery.

So it is with great pleasure that I welcome three new bloggers to E-Discovery 2.0:

• Dean Gonsowski is a lawyer who has spent the past 10 years advising corporations and law firms on how to improve their e-discovery processes. He teaches a series of continuing legal education courses on e-discovery, and is a member of The Sedona Conference Working Group on Electronic Document Retention and Production (WG1).
• Kurt Leafstrand is a rocket-scientist from MIT (I’m not kidding!) who is now very active in EDRM, and was a key contributor towards the recently published XML standards. He spends his days designing e-discovery solutions and has posted before on several topics.
• Will Uppington is also active in EDRM and Sedona. His particular passion is developing new search, analysis and web 2.0 technologies and applying these to reducing the costs and risks associated with e-discovery. He has also posted before.

I am thrilled to be joined by such a bright bunch, and hope you enjoy the new “e-discovery team” approach!