After successfully surviving the first month of Q4, we have our sights set on 2023 and what next year will bring. Winter aromas are not yet wafting from warm hearths, but the conversation with Vishal Parmar, Head of International Privacy at DaVita International, a healthcare organisation providing dialysis services, and Anna Nicola, Director at TransPerfect Legal Solutions, will spice up your coffee break.

We live in a global environment where commercial disputes, white-collar crime, and antitrust issues frequently cross international borders. There are thousands of non-English e-discovery litigations and investigations every year with billions of non-English documents hidden inside. When multilingual data is involved, every step of the process must pivot to accommodate the nuances and challenges foreign language brings. This requires significant linguistic insight paired with technical know-how considerably beyond the typical skill set of an e-discovery project manager.

The Georgetown Law Advanced eDiscovery Institute (AEDI) held in Washington, D.C., always presents as an outstanding educational experience even for the most sophisticated e-discovery attorney. This year was no exception. The Honorable David G. Campbell, Senior Judge, U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, and the Honorable Paul Grimm, District Judge, U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, opened the conference on November 17 with a discussion on proportionality and whether we are achieving proportionality in practice. Spoiler alert, we are not.

E-discovery has changed dramatically over the last decade. Not only must parties adhere to more complex data privacy and information governance requirements, but e-discovery, once the primary domain of law firm lawyers, can no longer be carried out without a full roster of experts, like skilled project managers, data privacy consultants, analytics experts, and 24/7 support and managed review teams. Choosing a discovery provider is already a daunting task for a law firm or corporate legal department on a case-by-case basis, but the stakes increase exponentially when picking a long-term discovery partner.

On September 21, 2022, TransPerfect Legal Solutions hosted its second annual Antitrust Clearance & Merger Enforcement Conference in Washington, DC. Industry experts discussed a range of topics including substantive developments in antitrust law and legal tech, and managed review in antitrust matters.

In the presentation on Modern Considerations in Merger Reviews, moderator Kenneth McGinnis was joined by panelists Oral Pottinger, Partner at Mayer Brown, Christopher Williams, Antitrust Partner at Perkins Coie, and Leslie Overton, Partner at Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider to explore how public interest and social justice objectives are impacting the merger clearance process.

Document production is becoming more common in arbitration today. Reliance on experts and other evidence to build and support a case has been and continues to be inevitable. Time and time again we see spiralling costs because parties live in the hope that a deep dive into the data will not be required and do not plan accordingly. However, foreseen or not, unearthing the facts and leaving no stone unturned in the surrounding factual matrix has a material impact on the outcome of an arbitration. Where expert evidence often provides more weight to a party’s position, ensuring they have access to the right documents is even more important.