Podcast: SCL Annual Lecture: Information and the Law – the Advent of Meaning Based Computing

March 15, 2011

Legal professionals worldwide are facing an ever-growing onslaught of information that they must understand and manage. The information explosion has presented them with a raft of content and risk management challenges involving the search, retrieval, analysis and processing of human-friendly content. Client requests to reduce cost and risk while streamlining processes coupled with mounting pressures from government, regulators and the courts are prompting law firms to re-evaluate their information management practices. Furthermore, widely publicised cases involving disputes around electronic discovery are a constant reminder of the need to turn to technology for a new, more automated and proactive approach to legal information management to handle terabyte issues.

But “new” requirements to produce all Electronically Stored Information (ESI) are not at all new. The requirement to present all content pertinent to a case has been with us since Roman times and we are dealing with old principles in new clothes. The legal system is indeed playing catch up with technology and has to recognise that electronic human-friendly information is yet another data format that needs to be analyzed and assessed for a holistic view of a matter.

To listen to the podcast and download the accompanying slides, click the links below:

Dr Mike Lynch OBE studied Engineering at Cambridge University and obtained a PhD in mathematical computing. He is a technology entrepreneur and is a pioneer of the Meaning Based Computing movement. Mike has founded a number of technology companies, including Autonomy, the UK’s largest software company by market capitalization and a member of the FTSE 100. He has held a number of advisory and board roles in the venture capital industry and is currently a non-executive director of the BBC.

He was named the Confederation of British Industry’s Entrepreneur of the Year, the European Business Leaders Awards’ Innovator of the Year for pioneering new approaches to search and information processing technology, and Management Today’s Entrepreneur of the Year 2009. Mike won an IEE Award for Outstanding Achievement and was awarded an OBE for Services to Enterprise.

He is also a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Lady Margaret Beaufort Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and the author of a number of academic papers on the subject of Pattern Recognition and Signal Processing.