LDSI appoints Deborah Coram as UK MD

Legal Document Services International – LDSI – has appointed Deborah Coram as Managing Director of LDSI’s UK business operations.

Deborah Coram has a legal background and practiced at two major Australian law firms. She was head of international business development at CT Summation and Director of Sales and Marketing for CT CaseVault. She also built and managed a major litigation support company in Australia.

She was also involved in founding of the new ALSP (Association of Litigation Support Professionals), which is committed to the development of certifications and standards within the litigation support industry. The press release abut her appointment is here.

An articled clerk in Gray’s Inn in the 1970s

An old name used by a web searcher stirs memories of typewritten lists of documents of long ago.

I keep a close eye on the web statistics from my web site and blog. They tell me, amongst other things, what people are putting into their search engines which find my pages, and that in turn tells me what to write about.

Most of the terms are modern ones. Today’s, for example, include document retention policy, outlook message metadata and tiff image in litigation as well as the names of people and products I have mentioned – and the terms I see are necessarily those which exist somewhere on my sites.

I had one yesterday which looked as out of place in my web stats as a coach and four on a motorway. It was Taylor Humbert solicitors.

Australia updates Federal Court ediscovery rules

New court rules for handling electronic documents are expected in Australia before the end of 2007. They will bite on as few as 500 documents, there will be a court-appointed expert to manage cases, and there is a massive investment in the infrastructure of the courts. The UK will be left behind.

The reasoning and the arguments are the same as in the UK and the US. Articles about the pending rules somehow imply that Australia is behind us in this area, which is not my own impression as to e-discovery. Australia is way ahead of the UK in investment in the civil courts

Commercial Court Long Trial Recommendations

The Report and Recommendations of the Commercial Court Long Trials Working Party was published on 6 December 2007. Its 83 pages deserve a closer look than time allows now, but we will have a quick summary of the passages relating to disclosure.

Its immediate context is long and complex trials and the management and preparation for them. The Commercial Court has long been the place where new ideas take root and the Commercial Court Guide has supplements to the CPR which, for the most part, can be used in any court where appropriate within the court’s discretion. The recommendations therefore have implications beyond the Commercial Court itself, and beyond the trial period which is to run from 1 February to 31 July 2008.

Litigation insurers have an interest in eDisclosure

My heading is not a report that litigation insurers have actually shown an interest in electronic disclosure. They clearly have an interest, though, in the sense that their interests must lie in anything which has the potential to bring parties as quickly as possible to settlement or to court.

The subject comes up with the news that Herbert Smith is apparently the first firm of solicitors to approach a broker directly to find financial backing for a case (see Herbies blaze a trail with litigation funding move in the Lawyer today). The broker was Calunius Capital LLP.

This is getting to be an interesting market, with Allianz announcing in mid-October that it was launching a new fund, aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, to back what they see as “genune” claims – for which read, presumably, ones thought very likely to succeed.

Victor Limongelli now CEO of Guidance Software

Guidance Software announced last week that Victor Limongelli has been appointed Chief Executive Officer.

I met Victor at a conference in London earlier this year. He is easy to spot – an American executive who speaks knowledgeably about the English court rules tends to stand out. His subject was Reducing the growing cost of eDisclosure and he was convincing on the need for UK and European corporations to (as he put it) “get their arms around their company’s e-mail and electronic documents” for litigation and regulatory reasons, to track suspicious activity by employees and – not least – to control the costs of doing business.