Jason R. Baron

Jason 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, and served as track coordinator for the first four years of the track (2006-2009). He also founded the international DESI (Discovery of Electronically Stored Information) workshop series, bringing together lawyers and academics to discuss cutting-edge issues in e-discovery. Since 2007, past DESI workshops have been held in Palo Alto, London, Barcelona, Pittsburgh and Rome, with a related workshop held in Beijing. In 2018, he co-chaired the first e-discovery conference held in India, at the National Law School of India University (Bangalore).

Jason has served as an Editor-in-Chief of three Sedona publications: The Sedona Conference Best Practices Commentary on the Use of Search and Information Retrieval Methods in E-Discovery (2007 & 2013 editions), The Sedona Conference Commentary on Achieving Quality in the E-Discovery Process (2009 & 2013 editions), and The Sedona Conference Commentary on Finding the Hidden ROI in Information Assets (2011); and also as Drafting Team editor on The Sedona Conference Commentary on Information Governance (2013).

Over the past decade, Jason has given presentations on preservation and access issues involving electronic records in over 500 forums, throughout the U.S. and Canada and as an international keynote or invited speaker at conferences held in Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, India, Italy, Nepal, the Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. In March 2007, Jason served as a co-panelist with Associate Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer at an e-discovery forum held at Georgetown Law School. In 2010, he was an invited speaker at the Duke Law School Conference on Civil Litigation Reform.

Jason has chaired e-discovery conferences, workshops and all-day CLE forums; facilitated information governance “boot camps”; moderated “mini-Sedona” sessions at annual meetings of ARMA International and the Society of American Archivists; moderated panel sessions at the Georgetown Advanced eDiscovery Institute conferences, and served as a guest lecturer at a number of law schools. He has given dozens of targeted briefings to federal audiences, including government lawyers, IT staff and records managers, on the subject of electronic recordkeeping under U.S. records laws.

Jason has taught e-discovery at American University’s Washington College of Law, and for 10 years was an adjunct faculty member at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, where he co-taught the first e-discovery course in the United States for graduate students in information studies. He also has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of British Columbia. Jason has participated in the drafting of reports for InterPARES, an international research project in archival science on the subject of the long-term preservation of electronic records.

In connection with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account, Jason has been invited to appear on NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America, MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” CNN’s “Smerconish,” NPR’s All Things Considered, Huff Post Live, and WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show. He has also been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, CBS News, The Wall Street Journal Washington Wire, Politico, Factcheck.org, and numerous other media outlets on general issues of government recordkeeping. Jason has been a featured columnist on information governance issues in Legal Tech News, and has appeared in feature articles including in Information Governance World and Law Technology News.

Jason R. Baron's CV