Emmett Leahy Award 2011

Charles Dollar: Jason is going to talk for at least an hour. He thinks this is a brief he's presenting. Good morning, my name is Charles Dollar and I'm the chair of the Emmett Leahy Award Committee, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the presentation of the Emmett J. Leahy Award to Jason R. Baron of the National Archives and Records Administration for Outstanding Contributions to the Records and Information Management Profession. I'm sure there's some of you who may not recognize the name Emmett "Ed" Leahy and may be wondering, "Who is this guy and why is there an award bearing his name?" I want to take a few minutes to share with you a brief biographical sketch of Ed Leahy and a history of the Emmett J. Leahy Award. Emmett Leahy was born on December 10, 1910 about 20 blocks north of this building. Grew up in Washington, DC. Attended high school here in DC. And in his third year of high school he elected to become a probationer under the Christian Brothers School. he graduated through that program and enrolled in American University. And then at La Salle University where he graduated in 1933. He taught high school in conjunction with a year at La Salle University and then moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1933 where he taught history at Boy's Central High School. He was still on track to go through the completion of all the steps to become a member of the Christian Brothers School Order, until he met Betty McGinnis. They met at an ice cream parlor and started dating. In 1934, Leahy who had enrolled in the graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh working on a Masters degree in history, decided to come to Washington, DC, and get a job that paid something so he and Betty could marry. His first job in the federal government was as a file clerk in the Federal Trade Commission. Not too far from here. He worked there and saw the construction of the National Archives building occurring, and he decided to apply for a job. He was interviewed by one of the senior people in the administration of the National Archives, Dorsey Hyde, Director of Archival Services. One of the striking things about Leahy's selection is that of the first group of people recruited to the National Archives to be archivists, he did not have a PhD, he was not working on a PhD, and he had not even finished his MA degree program at the University of Pittsburgh. So he must have made a very striking impression on Dorsey Hyde. When he came on board on July 25 of 1935, he became part of a group called examiners. Under the Authority of the National Archives Act of 1934, examiners were authorized to go out and inspect records of agencies and identify those of permanent value and those of useless value. And Leahy's work concentrated on the useless value side, working largely at the Treasury Department. He and the other examiners quickly realized that trying to identify records of permanent value and even records of useless value was very difficult, because of the terrible state of the management of the records. So Ed Leahy and another National Archives staff member named Phil Brooks became strong proponents of engagement with the agencies to help them improve the management of the records long before they would come into the custody of the National Archives. Phil Brooks and Ed Leahy, with the strong support of Solon J. Buck, the second Archivist of the United States - (His portrait is hanging on the wall as you go out. A stern-looking man, and he was somewhat stern.) - But in any event he strongly supported what was then called "records administration". Leahy worked in the National Archives until December of 1941, when he moved to the Department of the Navy to become the records administration officer. And in that capacity he greatly expanded the current records administration work. Among other things, he strongly enforced work to identify the enormous volume of useless records that the Navy Department had. He introduced work simplification in the form of identifying forms that collected redundant information. He created the first agency Records Management Center in a garage in Alexandria, Virginia to free up space for more important records in the Navy Department. And he was an expert and evangelist in the use of microfilm for the reduction of records. So Ed Leahy worked at the Navy until 1945. He was a commissioned officer, a commander. He resigned his commission and started work for the Remington Rand Corporation as a national sales manager for microfilm and as a records management consultant. He was in that job for two years when he decided to establish a National Records Management Council to promote records management. It was in that capacity as a national expert that he was invited to join the Hoover Commission and to chair a task force dealing with the reduction of records in the federal government. Coming out of that activity, eventually, was the creation of the General Services Administration in 1949. And the National Archives becoming a part of the General Services Administration. But what's far more important about the work that Ed Leahy did - he was a member of the National Archives Advisory Council that advised the Archivist. He represented the Secretary of the Navy. He participated in substantive discussions on the Records Disposal Act of 1943, the Draft Public Records Act of 1944, the Disposal Act of 1945, and the executive order that established records officers in federal agencies. That was in 1946. The key thing about Leahy's contribution as a pioneer was that the Public Records Act of 1944 was based on a proposal he submitted to the Bureau of Budget in 1942. Key provisions of that draft bill, which was never enacted, were incorporated into the Federal Records Act of 1950. And so Ed Leahy contributed enormously to the promotion of records management. This is a historic occasion in my view. We're meeting in the archivist reception room. Back in my time we called it Room 105. In this very room Ed Leahy sat as a member of the National Archives Advisory Council and offered substantive comments on proposed legislation that had to be approved by the Bureau of Budget before it could go to the appropriate committee of Congress. So this is historic. We're sitting where Ed Leahy sat. Not only is it historic in that respect. Today Jason Baron is the 42nd recipient of the Emmett J. Leahy Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Records Management. But he's not the first member of the staff of the National Archives to receive that reward. In fact, there's seven others. Everett Allredge 1969, Harold L. "Mark" Koenig 1974, Ben Oliver 1978, Artel Ricks 1987, Frank Evans 1995, Charles Dollar 2005, Ken Thibodeau 2008, and today Jason R. Baron. So it's a historic occasion. I want to add one other comment. There are a number of guests here, but I want to highlight especially the fact that we have members of the Emmett Leahy Award Committee. Ken Thibodeau and I, and John Phillips, who I will introduce momentarily, are current members of the Emmett Leahy Award Committee. The Emmett Leahy Award Committee has a rolling membership in that each recipient serves for ten years and becomes an alumnus. And the next recipient replaces that individual. So we have two people here today, Jim Coulson and Fred Diers, who are former recipients of the Emmett Leahy Award. We're glad to have them here. Thank you for allowing me to share these brief thoughts with you about Emmett Leahy. I'd like to invite the 10th Archivist of the United States, the Honorable David S. Ferriero, to share his thoughts on this occasion. David Ferriero: Thank you Charles. There is some irony in Mr. Leahy's history here, Jason. Around records of useless value. And it isn't lost on me. We are honored to be hosting this year’s Emmett Leahy Award ceremony today. As Charles just noted, Emmett Leahy was a longtime esteemed member of the greater National Archives family. It is particularly nice to know that a number of former NARA staffers have come back for today’s ceremony. It is with special pride to NARA that we celebrate and honor one of our lawyers with the prestigious Emmett Leahy Award today, Mr. Jason R. Baron. Jason is Director of Litigation in our Office of General Counsel. He is in fact the first and only person to have held this job, having been selected by Gary M. Stern, our General Counsel, to come to the National Archives in 2000. He came here after serving 20 years as a trial lawyer in government, first at the Department of Health and Human Services, and then after a dozen years in the Civil Division of the US Department of Justice. In addition to a prior award from NARA that Jason received while still a Justice Department attorney for his work in fashioning the 1995 e-mail regulations, in the decade since he came here to work Jason has been recognized with three of the highest honors this agency gives. He received Archivist Awards in 2002, “for extraordinary efforts in reviewing Presidential email records and assisting the Justice Department” in the U.S. versus Philip Morris case; in 2005, “for extraordinary services to the White House, the Senate, the public and the press in providing access to records pertaining to John Roberts,” and in 2009, “for bringing the electronic records of the George W. Bush Administration into NARA’s custody.” He has received many other honors and awards as well during his time in government, including from DOJ, NSC, HHS, SSA, as well as a Fed 100 award for his contributions to e-discovery advocacy. In my almost two years as Archivist, I have come to know Jason Baron and appreciate his expertise and respect he has earned from his peers. In his time at the Department of Justice and the National Archives, he has become what many people regard as the “go to” lawyer in the government on issues involving preservation of electronic records under the Federal Records Act. I know that Gary Stern and all of us at NARA greatly value his advice and counsel on all such matters, and in zealously defending the interests of this agency in litigation. I have also seen Jason in action at NARA conferences, as I’m sure many of you have – and I can tell you that he always exceeds expectations (which isn’t hard when the subject is compliance with records management). He is surely destined for his own slot in the Comedy Central lineup. Stay tuned! Jason is truly an enthusiastic champion of NARA’s mission everywhere he goes, and believe me he has gone everywhere – from Barcelona to Beijing, having given lectures and conducted workshops in numerous countries around the world in addition to making over 200 appearances in the US before federal agencies and at conference venues. In recent years Jason has been a thought leader in pushing the federal government to adopt smarter forms of electronic archiving, and in finding better ways to search through . large volumes of the government’s electronically stored record information. Finally, I can tell you all that Jason is universally admired and liked by NARA staff. Just one example is an email that came in about today’s event from a long time senior records analyst Mark Ferguson in our Denver regional office: Congratulations on winning the Emmett Leahy Award, the Nobel and Pulitzer of our profession. There is no higher honor for records managers. I am so pleased that a NARA employee won it and it is well- deserved. We in the National Records Management Program are so fortunate to have a Director of Litigation who actually takes an interest in the missions of our agency and provides such excellent counsel on how we should approach the complex issues facing life-cycle management of Federal records. I am glad you stayed on past your stated retirement date to get this honor. Jason, from all of 3500 of us in the NARA family, we extend our sincere congratulations upon this occasion and our thanks for your many years of wise counsel and service. Charles Dollar: I would like to invite US Federal Magistrate Judge, the honorable John Facciola. John Facciola: Thanks. I'm a little concerned about talking to an audience where people are standing. Seems to me there are only two possibilities. They're going to put me on their shoulders and lead me out to be their king. Or they're going to put me on a rail, tar and feather me, and take me out of here. And remember what Lincoln said about the guy who was tarred and feathered and led out on a rail. The guy said, "If it wasn't for the honor, I would have foregone the whole damn thing." I am honored to come and be part of the celebration of the extraordinary achievements of my dear friend Jason Baron. The fates decreed that Jason and I would meet and have a close personal friendship, and a professional relationship. I began my career in the private practice as a lawyer for Indian tribes. And I spent most of it in dusty, dirty warehouses in the middle of nowhere looking through old records for mistreatment of my clients by the United States. Which frankly wasn't that hard to find. And I spent a lifetime of doing this. Indeed, in a strange way I had an experience which led to the discovery of one of the most famous records in American history. I represented the Sioux Nation. They would achieve the greatest award against the United States in history. $100 million dollars for the gold in the Black Hills. There was always a question of why the gold miners were permitted to enter the Black Hills when the cavalry was there to supposedly keep them out. It was perceived there would be war between the Lakota Sioux and the United States if they got in. In any event, one morning there were the gold miners. And the 7th Cavalry was gone. And it was an expert witness working for us who found in the archives the secret order that Grant had issued, telling the cavalry to get out of there. An order that would later be described by Judge Nichols as evidence of the most despicable act in American history. Nevertheless, for every little piece of gold I found I did this five million times. And then computers came. And I remember going to the guy's house. You paid $10. And he demonstrated a spreadsheet on his computer. And if you've gone through life terrified of columns of numbers, this was magical. He changed the middle number and all the other ones changed. I was stupefied. This actually held out the hope that I would be able to balance my checkbook. Which I never have. And then I saw the first demonstration of a database. And I said, "I've got to get one." And I had more fun playing with this. And I used it on terribly significant stuff: recipes for grandma's pasta and Italian-American baseball players. Whom I organized by last name, batting average, and position. There came a very happy time when I met Jason for the first time. I think I had seen him before then in my courtroom glaring at me from the front row, noting all those errors for appeal. But there came a time at Sedona. Jason teases me whenever a judge gets reversed in the computer, legal research, there's a little red flag. Jason has suggested that I put that red flag on the sailboat. If I should be lost at sea, everybody will say, "Hey, that was Facciola!" But it was decreed that we would meet. And I heard Jason speak. And I knew suddenly and completely that I was in the presence of an extraordinarily creative imagination. There was about Jason a sense of playfulness, which may seem odd. But in my view, it is the heart and soul of his genius. I had the wonderful occasion once, Jason and I were somewhere, and there was a piano. Jason sat down and began to improvise on a jazz theme. And indicated to me that's what he hoped to do some day. And it occurred to me as I thought about Jason in preparation for today that that playful creativity displayed on that piano so guilelessly and completely is the same playfulness that animates Jason's intelligence and his desire to learn in this area. This may seem odd, but it occurs to me that without that playfulness there can be no creativity. I have just finished one of the most challenging periods in my judicial career. I have completed four opinions in 72 hours, all of them under emergency conditions. And last night I broke away to go to a reception. We celebrated the centennial of the birth of William B. Bryan. After whom our courthouse is named. And I had to run back to finish one of these bloody opinions, because the Court of Appeals wanted it this morning. And as I walked back to my office I thought, "This is fun." My second thought was, 'Facciola, you need a life." But I have seen in Jason a playfulness of imagination. And I think that is the heart and soul of the genius it takes to communicate that to others. Jason's most significant contribution is to take a topic that would bore the pants off a Talmudic Rabbi and make it fun. If I told you that you were going to hear him speak about TREC and you would laugh a lot, you would think I was crazy. But that is exactly what occurs. I'm reminded of what was said about Holmes in his 90's. That he was still amused by what he did. Like me, Jason has passed retirement age. And like Jason, people often come up to me and say, "Why don't you go out and make some money?" And I remind them of what Tug McGraw said. He pitched for the Mets and wrote a book called Screwball. Which was simultaneously his best pitch and the condition between his ears. And I asked old Tug what he was going to do with all his money. And he said, "Well 5% of it I'm going to spend on Irish whiskey and women. The rest I'm just going to waste." Jason's influence on me has been profound in so many ways. First of all, in permitting me to share his playful excitement about how we look for things. Anyone who doesn't appreciate the importance of that cannot be living in the 21st century. We don't make cars, we don't make machines that make cars. We have to find the information that tells the machine how to make the car. Jason's extraordinary contribution in how to do that is one of the most significant scholarly contributions in the 21st century and the legal profession. And I say that without fear of contradiction. His influence on me has been profound. Thanks to Jason I had a case called O'Keefe. And in it the lawyers came in throwing key words at each other. They had no more idea about key words than they did about life on the moon, but one said, "Well, if we use Jones as opposed to Smith, we'll get it." I then proceeded to write an opinion in which I pointed out that that's exactly what we did not need. What we needed was sophisticated intelligence to try to understand. My law clerks don't let me have any fun. Because the footnote they made me take out said, "Most lawyers think that they're experts in using key words because they once found a Chinese restaurant in San Fransisco using Google." That was the level of technical competence in this area with which Jason and I have had to deal. I was pilloried for that footnote, saying, "Facciola is doing nothing more than making business for vendors. He's probably on the take!" This is a suit from Joseph A. Bank. Honda Civic parked outside. But Jason came to my defense and explained the necessity of what I was saying. Thank god for that. I'm reminded of the great line in Duck Soup where Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo are being soldiers. And Groucho is standing next to Margaret Dumont and he says, "Can't you see these men are fighting for her honor? Which is more than she ever did." But thanks to Jason's noble defense, my reputation such as it is survived. The second profound influence that Jason had on me was in providing me with one of the greatest experiences of my life. The archivist up in Hyde Park at the FDR home wanted to get a painting that had been stuck in this admiral's office for several hundred years. A beautiful painting of FDR and his sailboat crossing the bow of the Independence. And the archivist said to Jason, "Do you know anybody who knows anything about sailing and FDR?" And since I'm the only human being on the earth who fit in that category, thanks to Jason I had the honor of speaking at Hyde Park about that. I want to tell Jason, and I'm sure he's as tickled as I am to learn, yesterday I got an application for a clerkship from Tracy Roosevelt. IE: FDR's great granddaughter. Now she's in the running. Don't jump to any conclusions. The second influence Jason had on me was in my resolution of the White House backup tapes case. As you remember, a group called CREW said that some e-mails had mysteriously disappeared from the White House. And that they were evidence of how the United States had gone to war in a particular instance. And I got enmeshed in what to do about all of that. But then confronted the situation that administrations were about to change. And I had 48 hours to do something. And I thought long and hard about what I was going to do. I must tell you that as far as I'm concerned, this is a sacred place. I have always believed that the Archives perform one of the most vital functions in a democracy. And I reminded myself of that by what Napoleon Bonaparte said about France. He said he didn't much care who wrote France's laws if he could write its history. I was confronted as to what to do with these tapes that had come into possession. We were between administrations. One administration had defeated the other. What to do? It was because of my recollection and my feelings of the integrity, honesty, and proficiency of Jason Baron that I decided to place those records into the supervisory custody of you. There was a direct relationship between what I knew of Jason and the confidence that I had that this precious part of American history was in good hands. It would have been enough if Jason simply knew all this and served the Archivist. But he hasn't stopped there. I know of no one who has taught more people more about these topics. I have been with Jason on many of those occasions. I have told Jason that thanks to him, I will never say no to an invitation to speak to either records managers or lawyers in public service. Because he is the archetype of public service. I have spent 30 years in the service of my country. And I will hopefully spend some more. But thanks to Jason, I will always feel indebted to that community of lawyers and record keepers. And as I said, Jason has decided to communicate to that group and others, and to share his profound knowledge. Without him I don't know where we would be in even the most fundamental understanding of how you look for things. Lawyers are terrible technicians. There is about to be issued a study by the Indiana law school, post-JD, 5 years later, asking young lawyers where they're strong and where they're weak. To a person they describe technology as the weakest part of their intellectual makeup. With Jason, I have tried to battle this. Lawyers in particular excuse themselves from this knowledge. I have had clowns appear before me and with a straight face say, "Your honor, I just don't understand this computer stuff." Why a demonstration of total incompetence is meant to amuse me escapes me. Often Jason has felt, I am sure, that he is pushing a big rock up a very high hill. But without him this society would be in much worse trouble than it is. So let me end with a recollection. When I was a kid I was very lucky. I went to a Jesuit high school in New York City. And we were blessed by the fact that the Jesuits didn't think our education ended at 3 o'clock. They took us all around town to see things. I guess the night I became a lawyer and judge was the night I saw Robert Bolts's A Man for All Seasons, about Thomas More. It tells the story of More's ultimate destruction. And a significant part of it is a character named Rich. Rich comes to London from the north of England full of ambition. He wants to make his way in the world, and he's going to either backslap or put knives in the backs of anybody who gets in his way. Of course this took place in Tudor England. It has nothing to do with modern day Washington. But More becomes aware that Rich is conflicted. And that his perdition awaits him if he goes in a certain direction. And indeed he will. He is the architect of the trumped up star chamber proceeding that leads More to leave his life. If you walk three blocks from here and go to St. Patrick's Church, you will see the statue of St. Thomas More which has been put there by the former pastor. A good friend of mine named Peter Vaghi, who was a lawyer and is now a priest. Which is either a step up or a step down, depending on your point of view. If you look, you will see that More is pointing down. And at his feet is the chain of his office, which is removed from his neck by the king's men when he refuses to swear allegiance, the Oath of Supremacy to his king as the Church of England. Earlier than that, he and Rich confront each other. And Rich says, "Sir Thomas, you must prefer me. You must speak to the Duke of Norfolk to get me a position." More says, "Rich, a man should not go where he is tempted." Rich says, "What shall I do, Sir Thomas?" And Sir Thomas says, "You're a teacher, Rich. Why don't you teach?" And Rich says, "Sir Thomas, if I teach who will know?" Sir Thomas says, "Well Rich, you, your students, and god. Not a bad audience Rich." So congratulations Jason. And by the way, not a bad audience, Jason. Charles Dollar: It is now my pleasure to introduce John Phillips, who is a retiring member of the Emmett Leahy Award Committee. Which is an independent organization and makes its selection solely upon specified criteria. John Phillips: Hello. It’s a pleasure to be here to speak with you today. We're obviously going to be recognizing Jason Baron. The Emmett Leahy Award Committee’s goal is to recognize excellence in the professional fields related to Records and Information Management. We are here today to recognize the accomplishments of an individual that has made a singularly grand and broad contribution to both the legal profession and the Records and Information Management professions. The Profession of Records Management, or Records and Information Management as we often call it today, is in turmoil. Records Managers, their customers, IT professionals, legal counsels, and executive management are all overwhelmed with the volume and variety of information management dilemmas facing us today. Business models change daily and we're creating new types of information. E-mail, Office documents, Web pages, digital images and incentives to use remotely hosted cloud based architectures can put business records, evidence for court proceedings and historical treasures at grave risk. Records Management is becoming a challenge for everyone. For these reasons, today’s offices are confronted with changing professional responsibilities and expectations for RMs, IT, and Legal regarding litigation and compliance. There is often talk about teaming between records creators, Records Managers, Archivists, IT and Legal to create solutions to these challenges. But, what we really needed was someone on the inside - a lawyer that really believed in what we were saying, understood both technologies and the law and could demonstrate it. Fortunately for all of us an individual has taken the lead and combined both intellectual understanding of these issues and the personal involvement in both litigation and information management professions to bring about numerous changes in the way we work and manage information. This individual is widely known for his connection to numerous landmark federal court cases. In the 1990s, as lead attorney for the government in the PROFS case (Armstrong v EOP), and the GRS 20 case (Public Citizen v Carlin), he helped set new expectations regarding how email is managed in federal agencies, especially with respect to the importance of metadata capture and management. Then, after coming to NARA in 2000, he led a team of 25 archivists and lawyers that responded to the discovery demands in United States v Phillip Morris, the lawsuit brought by the Clinton Justice Department against tobacco companies alleging violations of the RICO Act and other statutes. This intense experience in having to search through tens of millions of White House emails led him to key insights regarding the limitations of keyword searching in fulfillment of legal discovery obligations. Especially on the topic of search and retrieval, this individual has helped to found numerous activities that created information management insights regarding legal issues, and numerous publications. For example, his work with The Sedona Conference has included acting as Editor in Chief of a leading commentary on best practices in search and retrieval. He also helped found the TREC Legal Track for the National Institute of Standards and Technology Text Retrieval Conference. This is a unique international research project evaluating competing search methods used by lawyers. It has been widely considered to be of great value across several professions and disciplines. He is also considered a leader in the legal profession in encouraging thinking about alternative search methods to improve efficiency in discovery. And his efforts are bearing fruit. Recent research shows that various forms of machine learning have been documented as outperforming manual document review by humans. In addition he founded an international series of workshops known as the “DESI Workshop Series” which stands for Discovery of Electronically Stored Information, in which academics from the fields of information science, computer science, and artificial intelligence, have gotten together with the representatives of the legal community to discuss ways for lawyers to improve searching for information in various litigation contexts. This individual is also known for a number of “Firsts.” This individual was first to deliver a presentation on the emerging law of metadata during a Managing Electronic Records Conference in 1996. He was the first DOJ attorney to spend 10000+ hours litigating federal records act cases involving email, including assisting in crafting the first federal email regulations issued in 1995 by NARA. He was the first US lawyer who participated in InterPARES. He was (and still is) the first (and only) NARA Director of Litigation. He is the first lawyer to teach e-discovery at a graduate program in information studies in the US. He was the first federal lawyer to Co-Chair The Sedona Conference working group on electronic document retention and production. He was probably the first federal lawyer to have created a Youtube video on e-discovery And of course he is the first federal government lawyer to be awarded the Emmett Leahy Award. And only the second lawyer to do so. As many of you are aware, the individual that I am talking about is Jason R. Baron. Jason has been widely respected as a unique leader in the field of Records and Information Management for decades. He has brought his extensive knowledge and experience in records management and e-discovery issues, to help establish best practices, to set legal precedents, and to educate the legal and records management professions on important issues regarding the preservation of and access to information and records in electronic form. He has accomplished this through a career of scholarship and lecturing throughout the U.S. and the world, while also acting as a federal attorney working at the National Archives, as a leader in The Sedona Conference, and as an educator at several Universities. In all these capacities, he is looked upon as a thought leader in the legal and the records management professions. For all these reasons, Jason Baron is very deserving of the Emmett Leahy Award that celebrates the professional achievements and international admiration he has earned. So I would like to introduce to you Jason R. Baron. Jason Baron: This is way better than a retirement party. Thank you all so much for coming. I am profoundly grateful to Charles Dollar, John Phillips, and Jim Coulson, for their remarks here today, and to each of the members of the Emmett Leahy Award Committee for the great honor and privilege you have bestowed on me. I couldn’t do any better here than to quote Adrian Cunningham, last year’s winner of the Emmett Leahy Award in Australia, when he said that “adding my name to the distinguished list of previous award recipients, when there are so many other seemingly more worthy recipients who have not been so recognized, was both totally surprising and also immensely humbling.” I feel exactly the same way. Let me also say my thanks to David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and to Judge John Facciola, for their very kind words, for all of their past support and encouragement, and of course for taking time to be present today. I wish to also note “for the record” -- as we lawyer types say, but it seems especially appropriate in this setting -- that also present are: Deputy Archivist Debra Wall; colleagues from the White House; several past Emmett Leahy Award winners; numerous colleagues from NARA, including the terrific attorneys and archivists I work with in our Office of General Counsel; and many other close friends and colleagues from both the public and private sectors. These include a number of members of The Sedona Conference– some of whom I recently climbed The Great Wall of China with on the day before we conducted an e-discovery workshop in Beijing. And I can’t leave out former students from classes I have taught at the University of Maryland, as well as friends and family. I couldn’t be happier that all of you took time out for this occasion. My intent is to write up a more scholarly paper on what I see as the future of information management and the law for future uploading to the Emmett Leahy webpage. Today, however, I would like to make more personal remarks, as after all, at least on this occasion, the Emmett Leahy Award is not being presented at a formal records management conference, but at a somewhat more informal type of gathering – falling somewhere between a press conference and a substitute for a retirement party. Maybe it was in fact destiny that I have spent my life thinking about records. However, I confess I couldn’t really have imagined what my professional career would consist of when in 1977 I wrote an honors thesis in college on the privacy implications of a vast electronic database maintained by the FBI and accessible by the international organization Interpol. Later, after graduation from law school, in one fashion or another I always somehow got myself involved in the thick of records-related matters, including in major litigation. It is a tremendous honor to be the first practicing attorney in the federal government to receive this award, and I believe only the second lawyer to ever be so honored. I have never had a dull moment as a federal lawyer in 30 years of giving legal advice and litigating cases. I was very lucky to work first in the General Counsel’s office at HHS on large class action cases, and then for a dozen years at the Department of Justice. I will always be grateful to those who encouraged me to think about coming to work at DOJ, and for having faith in me while I was there. During my time at DOJ, I got the chance to work on record keeping lawsuits of landmark importance, most notably the Armstrong case, also known as the PROFS case. My then supervisor, Elizabeth Pugh, who later became General Counsel at NARA, asked me in June 1992 if I wanted to take the lead on the ongoing Armstrong lawsuit, saying that it wasn’t going to amount to much more work and would in any event soon go away on appeal! Her “hoodwinking” me ended up with my spending 10,000 hours in the 1990's on successive lawsuits concerning White House e-mail, and was the start of nearly 20 years of my continuously attending to the subject of preserving electronic records of the government as a whole. When I came to NARA, I quickly was engulfed in a huge RICO lawsuit brought by the U.S. against big tobacco (U.S. v. Philip Morris), which involved searches of millions of White House emails. This early experience at NARA led to what my colleagues in the e-discovery world have heard me describe as my personal Grail Quest, in attempting to educate the legal profession about more advanced, more efficient ways lawyers can use to search through vast collections of electronically stored information. This journey led me to pursue two of the smartest people in the information science world, Dr. Ellen Voorhees at NIST, and Dr. Douglas Oard, a professor of both advanced computer science and information studies at the University of Maryland, who together green-lighted and fostered the TREC Legal Track with me. Over the past five years, the TREC Legal Track has proven to be a unique research platform evaluating competing search methodologies in a legal setting. I was subsequently approached by members of the AI and Law community to foster what blossomed into an international series of so- called “DESI workshops,” that have brought together academics and lawyers to think about profound issues of information retrieval in the legal space. Along the way, Emmett Leahy award winner Bob Williams gave me an early showcase at Cohasset’s 1996 Managing Electronic Records Conference, to discuss an emerging law of metadata, and Emmett Leahy award winner Luciana Duranti invited me to teach at the University of British Columbia for a semester and to take part in InterPARES. I am so very grateful for those invites and for all the invites – many from those in the audience today -- to present and lecture at past conferences, workshops and events. I am also so very grateful to Richard Braman at The Sedona Conference -- a true visionary – who has been so supportive of all of my efforts to advance the path of the law, especially on the subject of search and information retrieval, in a just and reasoned way. Also, for the past 11 years, I have been enormously privileged to work in my “dream job” for NARA’s General Counsel, Gary M. Stern, who gives his staff the freedom to pursue their interests, wherever they may lead to around the US and the world (so long as we’re available 24/7 on our blackberries). I couldn’t have done any of this or achieved so much without his support in particular, or the support of successive Archivists and senior staff at this incomparable institution. And of course, I have been privileged to have such a wonderful family. My wife Robin has put up with my late nights and weekends worrying about records management and e-discovery for going on 20 years this December. And seeing my high-achieving daughter Rachel blossom in high school is the most meaningful award of all. My late Dad, Judson R. Baron, taught aeronautics at MIT. If he were around today, and if I told him I had received a Nobel Prize, he would say something like: that’s very good son, but just so you know, Linus Pauling and Madame Curie each received two Nobel prizes, so keep up the good work. Charles, please tell me that no one has received the Emmett Leahy award twice! Seriously, though, I do feel a certain responsibility, now that I have received this honor, to clearly lay out my vision, admittedly from a lawyer’s perspective, of some aspirational elements of information governance in the 21st century having to do with public and private sector records. And so today, let me make three basic points before this audience of records experts and e-discovery lawyer gurus. First, we need to declare an official end to the end-user being expected to act as de facto records manager. I typed that college honors thesis on an IBM Selectric typewriter, and didn’t have a PC at my work desk until 1987. With the profound changes in the workplace that have since occurred, it has become a cliché to point out that we are overwhelmed in both our professional and personal lives with the growth of electronic communications, first via e-mail, then voice mail, then the Web, with endless possibilities now for engaging in messaging and social networking on a vast array of mobile devices as well as using PCs. With the notion of secretaries who acted as office managers controlling the workflow of documents receding into distant memory, we are all seemingly tasked by our organizations to exercise responsible records management in addition to carrying out our primary job functions. This was last possible about 15 years ago, when the volume of email traffic was far less in terms of messages of substance or lasting importance to the organization. It makes no difference, at least in my personal view, whether the government remains stuck in a print to paper paradigm for purposes of official recordkeeping, or chooses to spend millions in adopting electronic record keeping software that highly depends on end-users performing manual record keeping functions – those approaches are all a legacy of late 20th century thinking that we need to shake off and move away from. I am calling for workers of the world to unite (especially in the public sector), in opposing efforts to enslave them in recordkeeping responsibilities when there are new and better automated ways to perform this vitally important function. Especially in a time of fiscal scarcity, it is all the more important that we be lean, smart and agile on the record keeping front. We need to understand that there are the technological means to accomplish record keeping in 2011, if institutions have the will to convert to them. A cadre of committed folks at NARA are leading the way in testing automated capture technologies with smart filters and auto categorization techniques, and I will continue to champion these approaches. I promise to work with the best and brightest people both in this organization and throughout government to ensure the success of these new approaches to capturing email and other forms of electronic records. Second, we all need to be more creative and interdisciplinary in our professional lives. My life and career has consisted of rowing between islands of excellence, including bringing “good news” from the world of information retrieval and artificial intelligence to the world of lawyers. I strongly believe that the legal community has been too insular in its approach to e-discovery, and needs to partner with academia and industry – including in insisting on optimization in e-discovery searches through the adoption of best practice standards, some of which may yet end up as recognized international standards. But even on such seemingly mundane matters as how to execute a legal hold over records and information, we lawyer types remain largely stuck in a paradigm that too often relies on people, rather than automated technologies, and doesn’t otherwise best utilize interdisciplinary resources. So my second call to arms is to say to the legal community that they best serve their clients by bringing in records managers as well as CIOs and IT staff early on in litigation and investigations. The records community particularly in government should be sitting at the table when agencies are in litigation crisis mode, as well as when decisions are made on procurement of new IT systems. The Rosetta Stone I talk about in my lectures needs to be used more, for lawyers, IT staff, and records staff to better understand each other’s needs, and to best leverage the power of technology to solve legal and information management problems. Third, at the start of the second decade of the 21st century, I believe we need to recognize that the time is now to prevent what I have termed the coming “digital Dark Ages.” Archivists and corporate information managers can take the lead on this. The ongoing, exponentially increasing explosion of information means that over the next several decades the world will be seeing records and information growth orders of magnitude larger than anything ever experienced by humankind on this planet to date. We all need better ways to search through these expanding universes of public and private sector electronically stored information. Nearly a century ago the archivist Hilary Jenkinson said we need “to neutralize the threat of hopeless unwieldiness” in our collective archives, and that was never more true than now. This Administration has been pushing from Day 1 for policies that serve to ensure greater openness and transparency throughout government, and indeed, Archivist David Ferriero has often been quoted as saying that effective records management is the backbone of open government. But lest we forget, T.R. Schellenberg observed that “[i]n working with his materials an archivist has the dual objective of preserving them and making them available for use.” The challenge for all of us is in both preserving and making accessible electronic records – otherwise, there is a near certainty that most of the history of the early 21st century, measured by volume of discrete electronic files, will not be open and available any time soon. Indeed, due to the need to protect privacy and due to other restrictions in place on discrete segments of these records, vast collections of e-records may end up being de facto inaccessible to historians and researchers for 75 years or more. In light of this identifiable certainty, the need exists to use new automated tools and technologies to ensure that personally identifiable information is properly filtered out of email archives, that new forms of software such as clustering algorithms are used to sort and categorize records worthy of more immediate opening in vast collections, and in general that automated technologies are more greatly employed to ensure that access to the public sector’s permanent electronic records is guaranteed in the near term. A couple of years back I said while presenting at the DELOS conference held in Rome, hosted by 2009 Emmett Leahy Award winner Maria Guercio, that our present daily collective digital experience is like standing underneath the climactic moments of a July 4th fireworks. (This metaphor I trust will work better in this room than it did in Italy.) As I said, we are all experiencing in our professional and personal lives a vast illumination, representing all the data that overwhelms us on a daily basis. But as in a July 4th fireworks display, the illumination is followed by sudden darkness. The paradox of our age is information overload followed by a future inability to access anything of importance – either because it was not preserved in the first place, or more perversely, to again echo Jenkinson, because it cannot be easily found amongst the unwieldy bulk of what has been preserved. We have a duty as stewards of future scholarship not to let that future happen -- so we all need to be smarter in preventing or mitigating this potential information dystopia. Those are my three calls to action. When I’m in the Archives building late at night, here on the Mall, ready to go home, I go through the large doors you all came through, and cross Pennsylvania Avenue. I always stop and turn to my right, looking East, where the Capitol dome is lit up. The sight still brings a clutch after all these decades in this city, still moves me to think that I am so very lucky to have spent my time doing my small part as a dedicated public servant to advance the cause of good government. I have always wanted to be “the man in the arena,” Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, not a mere critic on the sidelines. As this year’s honoree, I wish to dedicate the rest of my life in continuing in these causes, in dedicating my efforts towards education of the bench, the bar, of my federal colleagues, and students in the classroom, on the enduring importance of good records and information management principles in the digital age. And one last thing: as many of you know, I had a countdown clock to retirement after 30 years of federal service, and the alarm did go off six months ago as to my eligibility. It has been such a great privilege to be able to work on important issues involving electronic records during my time as a lawyer at this agency. However, given all the exciting things that are happening in the records and information management space, and the leadership exhibited by the Archivist, the news I wish to make today is … no real news: I just plan on sticking around for a little while longer. Thank you again to the Emmett Leahy Committee for this tremendous honor. Jim Coulson: Thank you so much Jason, and congratulations again. You said you were humble about adding your name to the roster. You haven't just filled a slot, you've raised the bar. So my congratulations to you. I am very proud to be here representing Huron Consulting Group. You'll be pleased to know that my remarks are the shortest of all the distinguished speakers today. As some of you may know, the expenses of the Emmett Leahy Award Committee are underwritten by Huron Legal as part of its commitment to manifesting and recognizing excellence in records management. The Emmett Leahy Award promotes and facilitates industry leadership and also facilitated RIM thought leadership And this has really turned into a global proposition. In fact, five of the last ten awardees have been from outside the United States, representing the UK, Italy, Australia, and Canada. So we're glad to see the award come back to the United States here. It should be noted that the Emmett Leahy Award Committee is an independent entity and is not a part of the Institute of Certified Records Managers, ARMA International, the National Archives or Huron Legal. The selection of the annual Emmett Leahy Award recipient is the exclusive responsibility of the Committee, composed of the last ten winners of this prestigious award. In closing, I extend my personal congratulations to Jason, a truly deserving recipient of the 2011 Emmett Leahy Award. Nowhere could be more appropriate for this honor to be bestowed than the National Archives. As we close this special celebratory event for Jason, I thank all of you for your attendance and wish you well from Huron Legal as we all continue to pursue excellence in records and information management. And I hope some of you will stick around to share some refreshments. Thank you all for coming.