Legal Commentary

Everybody at LegalTech New York was abuzz last week as speculation increased that Mohamed ElBaradei will be the next president of Egypt. Why the trending spike? Because the Nobel Peace Prize winner spoke a year ago at LegalTech -- on Feb. 1, 2010 -- about The Rule of Law and the Role of Information in Verifying Compliance in Developing Nations.

So Gonzalo de Cesare, (right) who presented this year's Feb. 1 keynote about the technology used in international war tribunals, received much teasing about what country he will lead in 2012.

De Cesare was this year's LTNY "rock star" with his ALM trifecta: first, with his powerful and moving keynote address; second, with his article, "History Repeats Itself," which appears in the newly redesigned Law Technology News inaugural issue that debuted at the show; and third, he was selected by our independent LTN Awards jury as the 2010 LTN IT Champion of the Year, and received his award immediately following his keynote address.

De Cesare, a native of Peru, has served as information officer for the United Nations, and has been deeply involved with international war crime tribunals, where he has focused on discovery and disclosure issues -- with the goal of establishing "repeatable processes" that can help safeguard the rights of all participants while processing millions of documents.

De Cesare and his team have developed disclosure standards for the trial of Slobodan Milosevic (the late president of the former Yugoslavia and Serbia), and prosecutions in Rwanda and Cambodia, incorporating legal technology such as the ZyLab eDiscovery System, LexisNexis CaseMap, West LiveNote, and IBM Lotus Sametime.

De Cesare is now serving as political advisor at the European Union Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In Kosovo, the teams are using Google Maps to pinpoint villages and other locations that are relevant to investigations.

So who knows what the future holds for de Cesare? And we'll all anxiously await news of who will be at the LegalTech podium on February 1, 2012!

Check out the LTN Video interview with de Cesare.