More poll results from the 10th annual UF Law eDiscovery Conference! These are poll results from miscellaneous sessions at this year’s conference!

As discussed in the first post, the conference had huge attendance and several of the terrific educational sessions conducted polls. So, I will be covering poll results over the next couple of weeks, thanks to Maribel Rivera who provided me the raw anonymized results from all the polls. So, here are the poll results from miscellaneous sessions – four sessions in all!

The first session was the terrific second day keynote: Unlocking Innovation: The Power of Inclusion and People at the Crossroads of Technology and the Law, presented by Hon. Tanya R. Kennedy, Associate Justice, Appellate Division, First Department, Supreme Court of the State of New York. The session had one poll question that had 803 responses. Here are the results of that poll question:

Which of the following do you believe is the most effective way to unlock innovation and bring together different perspectives at the crossroads of technology and law?

“Encouraging collaboration and communication” led the way with 44 percent of respondents. “Fostering an inclusive and equitable workplace” was second at 24 percent, followed by “Providing continuing legal technology education and resources” at 21 percent and “Supporting professional development and growth” at 11 percent. All of them are great ways to encourage innovation through different perspectives, which is why this might be one of the most balanced poll results we had. Why not do them all? 🙂

The next session was Mitigating Disclosure Burdens Arising from Attorney-Client Privilege and Work Product Protection, where the panelists were George Socha, Senior Vice President of Brand Awareness, Reveal; Adam Gajadharsingh, Discovery Counsel, Google; Melissa Heidrick, Manager, eDiscovery and Litigation Technology, Norton Rose Fulbright and Nirav Shah, eDiscovery Manager, The Home Depot. This session had one poll with 673 respondents:

Will SCOTUS’s refusal to resolve the circuit split as to what test to use to resolve dual-purpose business and legal communications affect your organization’s ability to preserve privilege?

Close to half of respondents (46 percent) said “Will be about the same”, followed by those who said “No” at 32 percent. Honestly, I’m not sure what the difference is between those two answers as both indicate no effect on the ability to preserve privilege (right?), so essentially 78 percent indicated little or no effect. 20 percent said there would be an effect, followed by 2 percent who asked “What is SCOTUS?”. Ruh-roh. 😮

The next session is “What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate”: Strategies to Avoid Motion Practice & Sanctions, with panelists Gary Jones, United States Magistrate Judge, Northern District of Florida; Bobby Malhotra, Litigation Partner, Winston & Strawn LLP; Gretchen Marty, eDiscovery Counsel, Littler Mendelson P.C.; Jessie Torres, Berger Singerman and William Hamilton, Senior Legal Skills Professor, University of Florida Levin College of Law. They had two polls, as follows:

My most effective technique in managing a difficult opposing counsel objecting to my request for production is:

More than three quarters (77 percent) of 715 respondents said “Engage in a dialogue to try to get to the bottom of the resistance”. Wow! Where are all these people in many of the case law rulings I cover? 😉 The only other choice with double-digit responses was “Provide the opposition with case law supporting my position” at 13 percent, followed by “Bring experts into the discussion” at 6 percent and “Threaten a motion for sanctions” at 4 percent. If we could get 77 percent of the entire legal profession to “engage in a dialogue to try to get to the bottom of the resistance”, the legal world might be a better place! 🙂

In the past year (January 2022 – present) how many motions for sanctions involving ediscovery issues have you been involved in either as a moving party or as a responding party:

Another lopsided result with 72 percent of 669 respondents saying “None”. Another 24 percent said “1 – 5” motions. That leaves only 4 percent that had more than five motions in a year, with only 1 percent having more than 10. Granted, many of the respondents may not be “in the trenches” when it comes to sanctions motions, but that is still a surprising result.

The last session for this post was Reprogram Your Brain: How and Why COVID Forever Changed Job Searches, which was one of the “Nuts and Bolts” session on the second day, presented by Jared Coseglia, Founder and CEO, TRU, with this poll question that garnered 705 responses:

What do you think was the biggest thing to forever change in hiring and job search post pandemic?

The leader here shouldn’t be that surprising – it was Work from Home (WFH) vs. Return To the Office (RTO) with 43 percent of responses. Surprisingly, “Culture conversations” was second with 21 percent, “AI in the job search process” was third with 16 percent (let’s see if that grows over time), “The speed of hire” was fourth with 14 percent and “Contracting over Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) was surprisingly last at just 6 percent. If this question gets asked next year, it will be interesting to see if the AI and contracting/FTE question results jump up!

Now that we have the poll results from miscellaneous sessions out of the way, there is one more blog post coming up on poll results from this year’s conference related to something everyone is talking about – AI! Look for that one later this week! Hey, you’ve waited this long!

BTW, what better reason to start getting people ready for next year’s conference? The dates for it are in the graphic at the top of the post!

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

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.