Jason R. Baron Bio

Jason R. Baron
Director of Litigation
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Special Edition: eDiscovery In The Age Of Exabytes: Using Advanced Automated Search Methods To Reduce Costs, Increase Compliance And Enhance Information Governance

The increasingly exponential growth of electronic data subject to litigation poses huge challenges, with current US and EU case law lagging behind advances in technology. New ways of approaching the problem of searching for electronically stored information hold the potential to revolutionize the eDiscovery process, providing greater efficiency and contributing to reducing bottom line costs. This session will discuss:

• Understanding the limitations of current search methods in eDiscovery
• Learning about new forms of automated search, including using auto-categorization, clustering algorithms, and predictive analytics
• Measuring the “quality” of the eDiscovery search process through the use of project management, sampling, and metrics
• Embracing new techniques to foster overall information governance

Jason R. Baron
Director of Litigation
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Jason R. Baron has served as the National Archives' Director of Litigation since May 2000. In this position, Mr. Baron is responsible for overseeing all litigation-related activities confronting the National Archives, including complex Federal court litigation involving access to Federal and Presidential records in the National Archives' custody. For the twelve-year period prior to his appointment as Director of Litigation, Mr. Baron held successive positions as trial attorney and senior counsel with the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division of the Department of Justice, where he represented the Archivist and various Executive Office of the President components in Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President (the PROFS case) and Public Citizen v. Carlin (the GRS 20 case), and was counsel of record in litigation involving regulation of the Internet.

As NARA's representative to The Sedona Conference®, Mr. Baron currently serves as Co-Chair of the Working Group on Electronic Document Retention and Production, having been appointed to the Working Group's Steering Committee in 2007. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Sedona Conference Best Practices Commentary on the Use of Search and Information Retrieval in E-Discovery, and Co-Editor in Chief of The Sedona Conference® Commentary on Achieving Quality in E-Discovery. Mr. Baron is also a founding coordinator of the TREC Legal Track, an international research project organized through the National Institute of Standards and Technology to evaluate search protocols used in e-discovery.

Immediately prior to joining the National Archives, Mr. Baron spent the Spring 2000 semester as a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia School of Library, Archival and Information Studies in Vancouver, B.C., where he taught a course on cyberspace law and participated in the InterPARES project. Mr. Baron received a B.A. degree magna cum laude in 1977 from Wesleyan University, and a J.D. degree in 1980 from the Boston University School of Law. Mr. Baron has authored many publications and is a frequent public speaker on the subject of the Federal Government's obligations with respect to the preservation of electronic records. He currently serves as an Adjunct Professor in the University of Maryland's graduate College of Information Studies. For a selected list of publications, see the National Archives Staff Publications.