Thursday, Doug Austin (Vice President of Professional Services at CloudNine Discovery) interviewed Jason R. Baron (of counsel at Drinker, Biddle & Reath) on the “eDiscoverydaily” blog.  (The third in a series of interviews about Legaltech New York 2016.)

If you don’t know Baron yet, his lengthy career includes serving as the “Director of Litigation for the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and as trial lawyer and Senior Counsel at the Department of Justice,” explained Austin. “He was a founding co-coordinator of the National Institute of Standards and Technology TREC Legal Track, a multi-year international information retrieval project devoted to evaluating search issues in a legal context. He also founded the international Discovery of Electronically Stored Information workshop series, bringing together lawyers and academics to discuss cutting-edge issues in e-discovery.”

Austin asked Baron about his general observations about the show. Baron’s   comments are definitely of interest to our crowd. For example, answering a question about “LTNY this year and how it fits into emerging trends.” Said Baron, “there were any number of sessions on analytics and applying analytics to a broader segment of the legal space, which I applaud.”

He also discussed privacy servers, bring-your-own-device, “shadow IT,” the new e-discovery amendments, as well as his work at the Information Governance Initiative.

But Baron’s last words were the most fun to read, because he talked about CodeX: “I must say I was surprised (to be) pulled in at the last moment to be a judge at the second ‘Shark Tank’ session—where I felt a little like being on ‘America’s Got Talent’ as one of three judges in the room looking at the individual entrepreneurs who were giving presentations,” said Baron.

(CodeX executive director Roland Vogl had lost his voice and had recruited “judge” Ralph Baxter to cover for him as moderator.)

“But, as the session progressed (and as recorded by David Horrigan, who was tweeting the session in live stream fashion) it seemed very clear to me that maybe it’s time for me to retire!  I say so because of the profusion of disruptive technologies in the space, whether it has to do with smart contracts or dialing up lawyers over the web, it all heavily suggests that all of our current business models are going to be disrupted in due course and maybe very soon!,” said Baron.

“There are simply a lot of exciting technologies in the space for which the CodeX people are fostering a platform.  In the end I confess to being quite happy [to be] pulled in, and I would urge your readership to pay attention to what CodeX is doing,” said Baron, who mentioned our upcoming CodeX FutureLaw 2016 on May 20, “which is focusing on how technology is changing the landscape of the legal profession and the impact of those changes.”

Photos: David Horrigan.

Monica Bay is a Fellow at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. Email: mbay@codex.stanford.edu. Twitter: @MonicaBay