PROGRAM SESSIONS

The man, the myth, and – according to one previous Summit attendee “the only person who can make caselaw interesting” – Jeremy Wikler returns with yet another entertaining installment of our annual Caselaw Update. Join Jeremy and a panel of leading experts as they weed through the previous year’s caselaw to provide a critical and thought-provoking summary to help keep us up to date.

This simulation session explores the often-overlooked space between incident response and discovery, where early decisions can significantly impact future litigation outcomes. Through a practical tabletop exercise, this session will examine real-world scenarios that highlight key coordination challenges, timing considerations, and documentation requirements. Learn how to align legal, technical and business teams to ensure defensible processes and minimize risk.

With AI tools increasingly integrated into legal practice, organizations face growing pressure to balance innovation with professional responsibility. This panel will explore the practical and ethical challenges surrounding the selection, deployment and oversight of AI systems used for legal research, drafting, analysis and discovery workflows. Panelists will discuss governance frameworks, human oversight obligations, confidentiality concerns, hallucination risks and emerging expectations that courts and regulators impose on lawyers using AI-assisted tools in practice.

The legal industry has spent years debating what technology can do for discovery. An equally pressing and less examined question is whether teams have the skills to wield it effectively. With over 22% of respondents in a recent industry survey identifying discovery competence as the challenge most underdiscussed in the field, this panel turns the spotlight inward. Panelists will share how they define discovery excellence in their organizations, build and retain teams with the right blend of legal, technical, and project management expertise and develop training frameworks that keep pace with rapidly evolving tools and expectations. From structuring career pathways to making the internal business case for discovery investment, this panel offers candid, practical perspectives on what it takes to build a high-performing discovery function and keep it on course.

eDiscovery still runs on inherited rituals, process steps that persist because they’re familiar, billable or defensible on paper, not because they meaningfully reduce risk. As AI capabilities accelerate, the real question isn’t “what can AI do?” but, rather, which parts of the operating model no longer make sense, and what replaces them. This panel will focus on how AI is reshaping the underlying logic of eDiscovery, challenging inherited workflows, redefining the role of human expertise and raising the bar for what efficient, defensible practice should look like. In a field built on precedent, the real challenge may be knowing which assumptions are still worth carrying forward.

Modern organizations communicate across an expanding network of email, cloud platforms, collaboration tools, mobile devices and ephemeral messaging apps. When a subpoena arrives, legal and technology teams must quickly identify and assess information spread across fragmented systems with limited time and context. This session will explore practical strategies for managing third-party discovery in today’s decentralized data environment, including early scoping, defensible collection, cross-functional coordination and the growing role of AI in modern subpoena response workflows.

AI adoption, fragmented data environments and expanding collaboration platforms are reshaping the governance and discovery landscape faster than most organizations can adapt. This session will examine the most pressing issues confronting data governance and discovery leaders and provide strategic recommendations to manage risk and unlock emerging opportunities. Expect to take away an understanding of the key drivers and trends that will enable in-house teams to optimize and future-proof their data governance and discovery-related strategies.

The skill sets honed through years of defensive discovery are proving to be powerful assets for offensive discovery. As mass tort and class action matters grow in volume and complexity, practitioners who understand data analytics and pattern recognition are uniquely positioned to add strategic value in claim analysis efforts. This panel of cross-disciplinary experts will explore how discovery professionals can apply their data knowledge and analytical capabilities to identify failures to comply with Lone Pine Orders, locate falsified or inflated claims, surface key trends across massive claimant populations, support more efficient case assessment and resolution strategies and ultimately drive the dismissal of unsupported claims.

This panel will explore what AI tools and technologies work well with investigations and Antitrust Second Requests. The compressed timing and overall volume of documents require practitioners and clients to consider how best to incorporate technologies while accounting for their deficiencies. Panelists will consider what works, under what circumstances and what technologies and/or changes may be needed.

Data has become one of the world’s most valuable assets and one of its greatest liabilities. As organizations accumulate vast amounts of consumer, employee and operational data, they face a growing wave of litigation, regulatory scrutiny and public pressure tied to how that information is collected, stored, protected and used. This session will explore the explosion of claims targeting large data holders, the evolving risks shaping the modern litigation landscape and what organizations must do to navigate an era where data exposure can erupt into enterprise-wide liability overnight.

Corporate witnesses today face an unrecognizable deposition landscape. Opposing counsel arrives armed with reconstructed chat threads, metadata from emails and AI-generated document chronologies that can attempt to expose gaps, inconsistencies and spoliation in real time. This panel of experts will examine the practical and strategic dimensions of preparing corporate witnesses to testify competently and credibly about how their organizations create, manage, store and preserve ESI. Panelists will address the challenge of translating technical concepts into plain-language testimony and what discovery counsel can do upstream, before depositions are even noticed, to reduce witness exposure.

As organizations manage growing volumes of data across increasingly complex systems, governance and compliance teams face mounting pressure to identify risk before it becomes a legal, regulatory or security problem. AI-driven tools are beginning to transform how organizations monitor information, detect compliance concerns and reduce unnecessary exposure across modern enterprise environments. This session will explore how organizations are using automation and AI to strengthen governance programs, improve oversight and build more proactive strategies for managing risk in an era of constant technological change.

It’s no secret that there are numerous contentious issues about the use of AI in discovery. Whether it’s how to adequately protect privilege in your organization, whether to disclose the use of AI in discovery, whether to treat AI agents as custodians or whether AI-generated meeting summaries should be produced, our panel of experts is on the case! These sleuths have investigated the issues and are ready to present their evidence to you. Don’t miss your chance to weigh in on these AI-related discovery conundrums in this raucous debate-style program. You will be entertained and learn something.

As enterprise organizations continue to expand their use of Microsoft 365, legal, compliance and technology teams are navigating a rapidly growing ecosystem of Teams chats, OneDrive data, transcripts, collaborative workspaces and AI-generated content. This user-focused session will examine the governance, discovery and operational challenges emerging across the modern M365 environment, including how organizations are managing retention, legal holds, Copilot adoption, data sprawl and cross-platform discovery workflows at enterprise scale. Panelists will share practical lessons, implementation strategies and real-world perspectives on building defensible governance programs inside today’s increasingly interconnected Microsoft ecosystem.

Twenty years ago, the 2006 amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure fundamentally reshaped the legal landscape and helped usher electronic discovery into the mainstream at the very moment EDI was founded. Two decades later, the pace of change has only accelerated. This session will reflect on the evolution of discovery from its formative years to today’s era of AI, cloud ecosystems and increasingly complex data environments, while looking ahead to the challenges and opportunities that will define the next generation of litigation and investigations. Join judges, practitioners and industry leaders for a forward-looking conversation on how the past twenty years transformed the profession, and what the next twenty may bring.