The University of Florida Levin College of Law (UF Law) E-Discovery Conference was a big success a couple of weeks ago in terms of educational content. But several of the sessions also featured polls of the audience (for which participation was required to get CLE credit – clever!). With nearly 1,500 attendees for each session, that resulted in some interesting poll results from the UF Law conference!

With permission from Bill Hamilton, I am publishing the results here (thanks to Maribel Rivera for providing them to me!) and providing some comments about each session’s polls above each. Of the sessions with polls, some had as few as a single poll, others had as many as six. There were enough polls that I plan to split them up over two posts and total number of respondents for each poll is shown in the title. Enjoy!

Case Law Session, Day 1:

One poll here, pretty even split. In essence, 48% (blue and yellow) don’t use ESI protocols, and 52% (grey and orange) use them at least some of the time. The fact that 26% of respondents would like to use a protocol, but need guidance tells me that they need to read Kelly Twigger’s nine-part series on them (part IX here, with links to the other parts in that post) and that they need a good template as a starting point. Here’s the poll results from this session:

ESI Protocol Session, Day 1:

Ironically, the use of ESI protocol question was in the previous session. The five poll questions here dealt with what should be in an ESI protocol. Ranked from highest to lowest percentage of “must haves” is: Form of Production (79%), Privilege and Privilege Logs (78%), Data Protection Specifications (72%), Search Methodology (59%) and Processing Specifications (51%). I’m surprised that 22% (213 people) don’t think coverage of privilege is a “must have” in an ESI protocol. Hmmm. Here’s the poll results from this session:

Proportionality Session, Day 1:

Two unique polls here. 80% of respondents (light blue and yellow) said that they find that opposing counsel is either almost always or often willing to cooperate in discovery, which is good news. In the second poll, 70% of respondents (grey and orange) either never use or only occasionally use AI-powered eDiscovery tools, which is not so good news (especially if you’re a provider of those tools). Looks like we still have a long way to go for widespread adoption of AI, which is consistent with my poll regarding predictive coding published earlier this year. Here’s the poll results from this session:

Accelerated Search Session, Day 2:

Two unique polls here as well. For the first poll, for one of the options, I interpreted “0.9” to be “90% or more”. Not sure exactly how to take the result here, but since the largest group (54%) said that eDiscovery is “more than 50%” of discovery, it seems to indicate that they feel a decent percentage of discovery still comes from paper (and/or other non-electronic sources). As for the second poll, I’m quite surprised to find that 60% of respondents use sampling to validate their search terms! That certainly didn’t happen in this case! Here’s the poll results from this session:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this is a very verbose blog post! 😉 I’ll publish and discuss the rest of the results tomorrow!

So, what do you think? Do any of these results jump out at you as surprising? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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