Mixing Beer Halls and Cross Border Privacy Laws – An Outsider’s Perspective on a Recent Data Privacy Meeting in Berlin
By good fortune, I was heading to Europe at the same time as the 8th Annual Sedona Conference International Program on Cross-Border Discovery and Data Protection Laws meeting to discuss what I believe is the biggest electronic discovery issue facing the industry, cross border e-discovery. I was thrilled at what good timing this was because a trip had been planned based on my daughter’s impending engagement to a guy the entire family likes who is from Croatia. Unfortunately despite my inquiry to attend, I was not invited to this Sedona meeting and Sedona meetings unlike most CLE programs are by invitation only.
Karl not getting into Conference
However, the Sedona team were very hospitable to me at the event and let me hang around the conference to network with my colleagues, many of whom are long term friends seeing that I had traveled thousands of miles to the conference already. Over the years, through my podcast site ESIBytes and other work I have done in the field as an entrepreneur with predictive coding, I have lots of good friends at Sedona and a good deal of respect for the organization and what it has done for the entire field of electronic discovery.
After receiving the news I was not getting in as a standby attendee, I went outside the hotel and met some Germans from Heidelberg who were attending the Black Sabbath concert in Berlin that evening. So at the same time some of my friends were discussing key changes to the EU-US Cross-Border Discovery Framework: A Practical Look at the effects of the new European legislation will have on EU-US cross border transfers in the context of litigation, government investigations, and internal investigations, inside the Hotel Adlon Kempinski, I was having an animated conversation with these 7 very happy Germans about Ozzie Osbourne in front of the Brandenburg Gates holding a beer and bratwurst. Given the lack of clarity on the rules for cross border electronic discovery on June 7th, 2016, I think I did pretty well in finding this back up plan. Though since I did not ask my friends for permission to post this picture, I might be in technical violation of European privacy laws, they seemed pretty hospitable to the idea that I was hanging out with them instead of some of my lawyer friends.
Karl Discussing Black Sabbath
The only downside to shadowing the event, is I wanted to inject some ideas on cross border litigation we have at Inspired Review which are very entrepreneurial and relate to how review controls provided by technology and the impact of social media might make the way we approach privacy rights more flexible. There are new ways to lock down data and improve the pool of document review professionals to put on review assignments. This is a cutting edge idea and one we wanted to discuss among a collection of regulators and experts in the field. The Sedona Conference offered a great chance as it has the best collection of international lawyers in one place that we could find.
The decision to attend on a “standby basis” did provide some dividends even though I did not get to attend the conference. At the end of the first day, I got the benefit of networking at the wine cocktail party with a group of my friends attending the conference. While there, I met a former negotiator from the UK involved in the data privacy Safe Harbor rule negotiations who invited me to a beer garden in Berlin which was great fun. He told me how he had tried to inject some information about Brexit into the conference which was not on the agenda but it had not been received from his perspective as being a hot topic. Though as history now shows, he was dead on right for bringing it up at the conference. He also thought our entrepreneurial idea of locking down the data in a country instead of the reviewer is worth discussing in more detail which was the type of feedback I was looking to hear.
Karl about to attend cocktail party at Sedona Conference
Now for the third party recap of the event based on conversations I had with my friends. The gist of the conference was inter-border e-discovery is a mess so there is not much that can be taught when the answers are so muddled. The invalidation of the Safe Harbor after the ECJ eliminated it has made cross border electronic discovery a quagmire. When I pay for a CLE program, I am sort of unique in that I like to learn answers to challenging questions and not just hear that the field is very unsettled. So we did save thousands of dollars in admission yet we also got to run one of our creative ideas we wanted to bring up at the conference by a former government negotiator who loved it and said it was worth pursuing. So I think it was a wonderful conference for us in hindsight even though we didn’t get to attend it in the traditional way because we saw more Berlin than most of the other attendees. Unfortunately, I just got a letter from Pennsylvania that I need more CLE credits to maintain my lawyer license. So I guess I will be making it in the door at the next CLE I attend.
Karl at beer hall in Berlin
Breaking news now in July of 2016 is doing a cross border E-Discovery conference now makes more sense because the EU Data Protection Regulation was adopted last month, and though not effective till May 25, 2018, there is now a framework in place which makes a European Data Security Conference a better deal to attend going forward. But hindsight is 20 20 and this Sedona Meeting was scheduled perhaps a half year before the legislation providing the framework was passed. So please let me know if you know any good data privacy conferences coming up which deal with foreign rules and concerns about data privacy in the backdrop of litigation or investigations which requires discovery. As this entrepreneur would love to make it onto the floor of the next conference and discuss some cutting edge ideas Inspired Review has for dealing with data privacy and review of electronic records.
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