One of the biggest issues in litigation management at the moment is e-disclosure.
From Goodale v Ministry of Justice (2009), where Senior Master Whitaker of the Queen’s Bench ordered the defendants to complete a draft e-disclosure questionnaire as part of the disclosure process, to the draft Practice Direction 31B on e-disclosure to the Civil Procedure Rule Committee, which came into force on 1 October 2010, the topic is beginning to dominate litigators’ thoughts.
Last week The Lawyer brought together an eminent panel for a town hall debate on the subject. Besides Whitaker, they comprised Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer litigation partner Geoff Nicholas, Phil Beckett of Navigant, 39 Essex Street’s Jonathan Bellamy and head of litigation
at Lloyds TSB Aamir Khan.
Slaughter and May senior partner Chris Saul chaired the debate in front of a rapt audience of some 70 lawyers, both private practice and in-house, who had many questions for the panel. Here is a flavour of the hour-long debate.
How do parties overcome capacity issues in terms of the retention of electronically stored information?
Nicholas: “The costs associated with hosting those documents means it’s important to get a level of agreement about whatneeds to be retained. There’s a tension here [as regards] trying to reduce the scope of the initial disclosure, but parties are being more conscious of sourcing documents later in the litigation.”
Beckett: “Ten years ago we’d print everything out and end up with four lever-arch files. Now if we were to do that the volume of paper would be equivalent to two or three times the height of the Empire State Building. So costs are driven by the volumes of data.”
Is a computer more reliable than a human in deciding whether a document is relevant or not?
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Source: The Lawyer
By: Catrin Griffiths
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