The e-Discovery of Document Retention

The IQPC Conference on Information Retention and E-Disclosure Management, London 22 and 23 May 2007

A load of self-imposed rules and habits were cast aside this week.

I usually sit at my desk until the early hours, and dawn is something which comes at the end of the day not the beginning.

I don’t go to conferences, mainly because I usually fall asleep if I am merely an observer rather than a participant – mildly embarrassing at concerts, deeply so at business events.

I don’t name products or suppliers, partly because of a hazy notion that I compromise my independence by doing so and partly for fear that rival suppliers will never speak to me again.

So it was a little out of character that, for two days running this week, I was on a train to London at 5:51am for Legal IQ’s conference on Information Retention and E-Disclosure Management. I stayed awake and interested through nearly 18 hours of a very deep and wide exploration of the issues implicit in the conference title, and I name the supplier with no qualms.

Master Whitaker Honorary President of LiST

Master Whitaker has agreed to become Honorary President of LiST, the Legal Technology Support Group.

Master Whitaker is a Master of the Supreme Court, Queen’s Bench Division, and a member of the Civil Procedure Rule Committee.

He has long been an enthusiastic proponent of the use of technology in the UK courts, and is a frequent speaker at seminars and conferences, particularly on the subject of e-Disclosure.

There is information about LiST on my web site, including a commentary on LiST’s Data Exchange Protocol Part 2 of 2 – Disclosure Data which was published at the end of April 2007.

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LiST’s Data Exchange Protocol – Disclosure Data

“Part 2 of LiST’s Data Exchange Protocol says that adherence to the Protocol “may require a party to enlist the expertise of an external consultant”. That is what I do, and is both my reason for writing about this area and the qualification for doing so. I mention it at the beginning, rather than shyly slipping it in at the end, because the availability of such services, and the fact that you can rent litigation software, host it externally and outsource the scanning and coding, means that anyone engaged in document-heavy litigation can compete on equal terms with the large firms whose experts wrote the Data Exchange Protocol.

What follows is therefore a summary of LiST’s Data Exchange Protocol for the benefit of those who may not have in-house expertise or software but who are receptive to the idea that their clients’ interests, and their own commercial interests, lie in competing for document-heavy dispute work with large and technically-proficient firms, and in doing it cost-effectively.”

 

This is an extract from my commentary on Part 2 of LiST’s Data Exchange Protocol, which came out at the end of April.