EVEN BEFORE FOUNDING The Sedona
Conference—a think tank on law and
policy—Braman was not the typical
corporate lawyer. Along with practicing
antitrust law (and serving as cochair of
that group at Minneapolis’s Gray Plant
Mooty), he also ran a well known Twin
Cities jazz club. Relocating to Sedona,
Arizona in the mid-1990s, Braman went
on to have an anything-but-typical impact on the law, too—specifically, on the
rules for e-discovery.
Those rules were conspicuously ab-
sent in 2002, when the Sedona Confer-
ence brought together the best minds
in e-discovery to, in effect, create them.
Led by a former partner of Braman’s
from Minneapolis, Jonathan Redgrave,
Sedona’s first working group (there
are now 10, on a variety of legal top-
ics) published the groundbreaking “Se-
dona Principles”— 14 guidelines for the
e-discovery process with commentary
chock-full of best practices. Just as im-
portant, the Principles offered a guide to
how parties should communicate with
each other during that process. From
the start, a prescient Sedona Conference
saw that cooperation would be vital for
efficient and cost-effective e-discovery.
BACK IN 1996, BEFORE IT WAS
COMMONPLACE, CTO JOHN
TREDENNICK PUT A WEB-BASED
INTERFACE ON HOLLAND & HART’S
DOCKETING SYSTEM, SO THAT A USER’S
LOCATION BECAME IRRELEVANT.
document retention and production.
“You could say that The Principles defi-
nitely jump-started the 2006 amend-
ments.”
Nor was Braman simply the organizer
who brought the right people to the right
place at the right time. “You’d have a room
of 120 lawyers and judges, and he’d be
walking around, driving the conversation,
asking questions and pushing people,” says
Paul Weiss partner Boehning, who is also
a member of the working group. Braman
“played the role very effectively, and he
kept us all on message.”
Contributing editor Alan Cohen writes
about law firms and technology. Email:
alanc31@yahoo.com.
