The Sedona Conference® and the Georgetown Advanced eDiscovery Institute (EDI) have a long history of working together to produce the finest eDiscovery education in the nation. Working Group 1 members have formed the core of EDI’s planning committee and faculty since its inception, and Sedona Working Group Series publications have been central to the EDI curriculum. This year, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of this unique collaboration by bringing the Sedona eDiscovery Cooperation Training Program to Georgetown.
On the afternoon of EDI Day One (Thursday November 21), members of Working Group 1 will host three concurrent sessions entitled “Cooperation in Practice.” Each session will feature a panel of experts, including state and federal judges, who will review and critique the performance of two teams assigned to negotiate the scope of discovery in an employment discrimination case. The teams will be required to prepare in advance but will “meet and confer” for the first time in front of the EDI audience. The expert panels will evaluate each teams’ cooperative advocacy skills – both how well they negotiate and how well they represent their clients’ interests. These three concurrent sessions will provide a taste of what the full two-day Sedona Conference Cooperation Training Program (scheduled for February 13-14th, 2014, in Chicago) will be like for the 45 enrollees.
We hope that you can join us for this special program at EDI, which will feature personal greetings and introductory remarks in all three sessions from Richard Braman, the founder and Executive Director Emeritus of The Sedona Conference®.
VOLUNTEERS NEEDED
If you plan to join us at EDI this year, we need 12 volunteers who are willing to participate on one of six cooperation advocacy teams. Depending on the makeup of the volunteer pool, our plan is to pair up one veteran eDiscovery lawyer with one relative novice on each team. And we hope volunteers will stretch their comfort zone – those who normally represent requesting parties be willing to be on a responding party team, and vice versa. If you are willing to prepare in advance with a teammate, perform in front of an audience, and be evaluated by a panel of experts, we want to hear from you by October 31. Special instruction packets will be distributed to the teams on November 8, giving teams almost two weeks to prepare their “meet and confer” cooperative advocacy strategies.
To volunteer, send an email message telling us a little about yourself by October 31 to Michael Pomarico at [email protected].