Baron ’77 Honored for Information and Records Management

(Story contributed by Gabe Rosenberg ’16)

Jason Baron ’77, director of Litigation at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, is the 2011 recipient of the Emmett Leahy Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Information and Records Management Profession. Baron is the first federal lawyer, and only the second lawyer, to receive this international award in its 40-year history.

The Emmett Leahy Award Committee announced that for over two decades, Baron’s leadership efforts have promoted an awareness of the importance of good records management to the legal profession. He has served as co-chair and editor-in-chief of three publications by The Sedona Conference©, a nonprofit research and educational institute dedicated to the study of various fields related to complex litigation, including e-discovery. He is the author of more than 40 articles on electronic records issues, and has made more than 300 presentations on related subjects at conferences and workshops throughout the United States and the world.

Baron, a 1980 graduate of Boston University School of Law, also recently received the 2012 D.C. Public Service Award from his law school for his 32-year career in the federal government. Prior to his position at NARA, Baron was a trial lawyer and senior counsel at the Department of Justice, where he served as lead counsel on landmark litigation involving the preservation of White House email.

Baron helped found the TREC Legal Track, an international research project run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, evaluating search methods used by lawyers, as well as the DESI Workshop Series, an international forum for academics and lawyers to discuss e-discovery, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence.

Currently, Baron serves on the Adjunct Faculty of the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, where he co-taught the first e-discovery course to Ph.D and Masters candidates in the United States. He presently also serves on the Board of Directors of ARMA International, and is a member of the advisory board for the Georgetown Law Center Advanced E-Discovery Institute.

During his time at Wesleyan, Baron double majored in government and English, where, apropos of his future career, he was awarded honors for his government thesis on the subject of privacy issues associated with a database of electronic records maintained by the FBI.

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