How in demand must ediscovery skills be that you can have one website dedicated to Litigation Support careers conducting a talent drive, while another hroup is launching another site dedicated to ediscovery careers?

I’d say there must be some serious demand out there, wouldn’t you?

Now, since I’m not really in the market, I haven’t been involved much in either of the sites, but if you have been looking at them, from either the employee or employer side, what do you think about it?

For the second year, the fine folks over at TRU Staffing Partners are offering scholarships to cover the costs of some great eDiscovery and legal technology education. If you’re looking to get some great education in this field, you may want to consider applying before the deadline of Feb. 15

According to the link above, the courses being offered are:

DTI/Litworks Certified Litigation Support Professional
Four-day course offering industry best practices learned through hands-on experience, networking with peers, and reviewing leading software tools. The course is designed for professionals with one to five years of litigation technology support experience or for litigation paralegals, document review attorneys and legal IT professionals.

DTI/Litworks Certified Litigation Support Project Manager
Three-day course that focuses on sharpening litigation support project management skills and techniques, with an eye towards building skills. Attendees receive practical resources and tools, including checklists and templates that can be immediately applied to daily work as a litigation support project manager.

Georgetown University SCS Paralegal Program – Advanced Litigation & Trial Technology Course
Covers the tools and thought processes that drive the use of technology in today’s litigation landscape. You will gain hands-on experience with tools such as Forensic Toolkit, Concordance, CaseMap, and TrialDirector; but more importantly you will learn how these tools create a more efficient and effective litigation workflow. The course will include lecture, hands-on work and course projects that will enhance your learning in this exciting field.

Georgetown University SCS Paralegal Program e-Discovery course
This course introduces key e-discovery concepts that paralegals will apply in most of the matters that they support. Through a combination of lectures, hands-on classroom exercises, and written assignments, students will learn how to spot critical e-discovery issues and how to best resolve them.

Georgetown University SCS Paralegal Program Legal Project Management Course
Students will first learn Project Management Fundamentals, and Project Management Planning and Controls and then how to apply concepts to legal scenarios via case studies in Collection Plans, Production Plans, Trial Preparation Plans, and eDiscovery Program “plans“. Students will create group project plans and present them to a panel of leading Litigation Support and eDiscovery professionals. The course will satisfy the education requirement to apply for the CAPM or PMP credential.

LIU Post Paralegal Studies Program Litigation Support/e-Discovery course
This brand-new course is designed to give students an in-depth perspective on the litigation support industry. Through discussion and hands-on application, students will be introduced to the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) and learn common best practices and workflow techniques for electronic data processing and analysis. The course will also familiarize students with the basics of e-Discovery Project Management. A group project allows students to apply their knowledge to a mock real-world scenario on the final day.

Bryan University e-Discovery Project Management Certificate Program
An online, real-time fully accredited 7 1/2 month intensive practical e-discovery project management curriculum taught by a nationally renowned faculty. The program utilizes a comprehensive prepare/collaborate/engage teaching model combined with practical experience handling digital data with state of the art e-discovery processing, search, review, and production software and tools. Click here for a downloadable pdf with course details.

Learn About e-Discovery
This program will help you to find the educationally valuable information that you need to grow in your understanding of electronic discovery. First, you will have a 30 minute phone call to discuss your learning objectives, how much time you have available each week to dedicate to learning more about e-discovery. You will be sent a dynamic customized learning plan that meets (or exceeds your learning objectives based on what you’d like to learn and how much time you have to spend on it. The plan includes Internet accessible blog posts, videos, presentations, articles, white papers and podcasts organized in a manageable order in order to maximize your learning experience.

Over at Ligitation Support Careers, they are starting up a Winter Talent Drive to try and hook up eDiscovery talent with employers looking for that talent.

LitigationSupportCareers.com announces the start of the third annual eDiscovery Talent Drive!  The career fair will last for one month, and is a virtual event connecting employers with talented job seekers in the legal vertical worldwide!  The eDiscovery Talent Drive will focus on litigation and support jobs.

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Those job seekers interested in participating should go tohttp://www.litigationsupportcareers.com/careerfairs.html to find details and register.  There is no cost to job seekers to register for this event.

I’m not in the market for a new position right now, but if you are, I’d at least check it out.

That’s the take away quote from my latest post over at the AccessData eDiscovery Insights blog. In it, I encourage the legal profession to avoid looking at workflows in terms of what we’ve always done, and begin to think about the most efficient ways to use technology to get to the end result.

A hint, the end result is not getting a horse to another location, but getting ourselves there, even if it means leaving behind some of our old habits.

It’s not quite dead yet, but it certainly is on the deathwatch. Given that fact, while I’m not quite pulling the plug on using Feedburner for the RSS feed from this site, or the email subscription to the site, I have switched the sidebar on the blog to use the original WordPress RSS feeds and the built-in WordPress Jetpack email subscription instead of the Feedburner ones. So new subscribers to the feed or the email list, will now be using those services instead of Feedburner, and I’ll be prepared ahead of time for what seems to be the inevitable shuttering of the service.

If you’re a current subscriber to either the Feedburner RSS or Feedburner email list, you may want to update those subscriptions as well. You know, just in case.

You’ll find links to do that on the sidebar, as well as links to follow on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus as well, if you’d rather do that.

Yes, I’ll be there, and we’ll be doing a random assortment of hands on training sessions for Summation, as well as all our forensic products. So if you have interest in attending the AccessData User’s Conference at the Aria resort in Vegas next April, you might as well take advantage of early-bird pricing, no?

You can check out the details on the website:

http://www.ad-users.com/

Interestingly, I ran into a reader of the blog in one of our sessions last week at the ILTA 2012 Annual Conference. We briefly talked about the reasons behind my not writing about Litigation Support and eDiscovery, the biggest being the fact that I work for a vendor now, and am not exactly unbiased.

So, since this was my first time at ILTA as a vendor, I talked just before going about what a different experience it would be, and it definitely was, including that conversation. One of the ways it was different was my inability to really get to many sessions, and also my inability to really tweet and/or blog about those sessions. Unlike being an attendee, being part of the support team for a vendor means a lot more working behind the scenes, a lot more talking with our clients, and just generally a lot more time spent outside the social sphere that you get when you’re a paid attendee. Simply put, we don’t get invited to all the parties, but we have our one party to be concerned with. That’s a big difference when you stop to think about it, and I think it sums up the week nicely.

Of course, I couldn’t resist the urge to mark down some thoughts on the conference, and on what I learned from talking to folks through the week. Like all my ediscovery blogging though, that post can now be found over at AccessData’s eDiscovery Insight Blog. Check it out, and let me know your thoughts on the growing power of ediscovery software and the need for continued training. Are we truly entering a new phase, or just expanding on the phase started years ago?

Last year, I attended the annual ILTA conference in Nashville as just an attendee, with no speaking commitments. That made for a bit of a different experience than the previous years that I had attended, and I enjoyed the freedom to attend more sessions, enjoy the social gatherings without fretting for missing prep time for a session the next day, etc. I got to see the conference in a bit of a different light when I wasn’t involved in any of it as intimately as I had been as a speaker.

This year, I’ll be seeing the conference from yet another perspective, as I attend for the first time as a vendor, as opposed to an ILTA member. I honestly have no idea what to expect. If I were part of our sales team, I would tell you to come by the booth and say hello, but I’m not part of the sales team. While I expect I will be around at the booth at various times, that won’t be my main responsibility. My main responsibility will be in providing support for our sales team, especially in our hands-on demo lab. So at the very least, I know I’ll be in our demo room during the morning demo sessions Tuesday-Thursday. I can also assume I’ll be in that room setting up on Monday, and packing it up Thursday afternoon. Aside from that, I may be at the booth some talking to our customers, I may try and hit a session or two, and some of the networking events during the evenings. It’s hard to say for sure, since this will be a brand new experience for me!

Still, I hope to see some old friends, say hello and catch up a bit, even if I am over on the dark side now….

A post over on Seth Godin’s Blog that I ran across today has left me thinking. In it, Seth talks about how technology now allows us to help our readers:

Just recently (a decade or so) we opened two doors that change the way we communicate: we can link now, which means that any time you’re worried you’ve hit something too complex, you can easily link to more data and more explanation, and second, you can keep writing. Length (given appropriate organization) is no longer an issue.

I’ve been thinking about this when it comes to training, because I think we might actually have this backwards. We spend a lot of time putting together printed training manuals, and of course, the all important “hand-out”, because we are expected to leave our students with something they can walk out of the room with and take back to their offices. That’s all well and good, but we are seriously limiting what we give them when we take our information and “dumb it down” into less usable formats, like the printed book or printed cheat sheet.

By their very nature, we are limited in what we can put in a book, or on a cheat sheet. We can’t link to more information for those readers who might not understand a particular concept, we have to keep it short, and try to use static screenshots in our manuals instead of how-to videos. (And god help us if a new update changes the screen slightly before we can update the manual!) That’s a lot of work that could be done more easily, and be more useful to our clients, if we could utilize web technologies.

Of course, there are copyright, and commercial, concerns in many cases. Materials provided online are much harder to “limit” to just those who have paid for them. We all know that, but I do believe that is a challenge we’re all going to have to face at some point. The added advantages are simply too great to continue ignoring online based materials, and our more digital workers are only becoming less likely to keep printed books and cheat sheets around.

What do you think? Do you like leaving training with something to hold, or would you rather be able to grab the parts you want electronically?

At the risk of coming across as a sales guy for the company I work for, I wanted to share a couple of resources that are available to learn more about mobile forensics.

First, you can see the Mobile Phone Examiner (MPE) at work over at the AccessData YouTube channel here.

Second, you can check out the Podranger Podcast interview with Lee Reiber, now available on iTunes

Now I’ll stop being such a shill and get back to regularly scheduled blogging.