High praise for e-Disclosure Podcast

I must obviously be even-handed and objective when passing on recommendations for e-Disclosure events and initiatives, and in reporting that CPDCast’s e-Disclosure Podcast has been described by one barrister listener as “brilliant”, I should not be inhibited by the fact that I was the speaker.

I am, of course, inhibited about it, but I pass it on anyway because the whole point of doing such things is to get new audiences for the subject. I will attribute any favourable comments to James Sheedy’s thoughtful questions, as I did in my article about the recording – see Free e-Disclosure Podcast from CPDCast.

That article includes details of how to access the free Podcast. As I said there, I would be pleased to come and present a longer version to law firms and others who would like a deeper survey of electronic disclosure.

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Fast Track Directions in Australian Federal Court

The  Australian Federal Court has promulgated new Fast Track Directions which aim to get a case finished within 5 to 8 months, and to reduce costs by limiting discovery and avoiding lengthy interlocutory disputes.

I have noted before that the Australian courts have a more flexible approach to the eligibility of a case for special tracking arrangements – a case is fit for the fast track (subject to some exceptions) because that is what the parties agree or what the court orders, whereas the UK allocation depends on fixed limits.

Pleadings are replaced with Fast Track Statements, Responses and Cross-Claims. There is an express general duty to co-operate and to act in good faith,expressed thus:

5.1 The Court expects the parties and their representatives to cooperate with, and assist, the Court in ensuring the proceeding is conducted in accordance with the Fast Track Directions so that the real issues in dispute are identified as early as possible and are dealt with in the most efficient way possible.

There is also an extension of that duty to co-operate in respect of interlocutory disputes which is put like this:

5.2    Before making any application relating to an interlocutory dispute (including disputes in relation to discovery), the parties must meet and confer and attempt to resolve the dispute in good faith.  If the parties are unable to resolve the dispute, any application about the issue must contain a certificate by the moving party’s lawyer that the ‘meet and confer’ requirement was completed, though unsuccessful.  Failure to so certify will result in the application being immediately refused.

Discovery itself is limited in a manner which reflects the rules, if not necessarily the practice, under the UK CPR. The requirement is

7.1    Except where expanded or limited by the presiding judge, discovery if ordered in proceedings to which the Fast Track Directions apply will be confined to documents in the following categories:

(a)  documents on which a party intends to rely; and

(b)  documents that have significant probative value adverse to a party’s case.

… and there is a duty to make a ‘good-faith proportionate search’ and to explain what steps have been taken.

The court’s duty of active management is both expressly provided for and clearly implicit in the scheduling arrangements. The new Practice Note  fits briskly on to ten pages. It will be interesting to hear how it goes and what the practitioners and judges feel about it after a year of operations.

My thanks to Geoffrey Lambert of KordaMentha for drawing my attention to the Fast Track Directions.

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Autonomy audio processing for law firms

Autonomy has wasted little time in extending its search technology into the iManage products which came to it with the acquisition of Interwoven. It has announced an audio processing capability for what is now called Autonomy iManage WorkSite.

The business rationale lies in the growing amount of audio which law firms now have. Voice-mails, recorded depositions, in-house educational materials, and a wide range of other sources are now routinely recorded and kept. The need to search them is no less than the need to hunt down documents in more conventional forms – and it is a measure of how far we have come that we now consider Word files, spreadsheets and other electronic files as “conventional”.

Keyword searching for e-disclosure documents is not like using Google

There is no one-size-fits-all answer when deciding what keywords (and what else apart from keywords) to use to arrive at the “right” set of documents for disclosure. You have to educate yourself to know what the court expects. There is more to it than finding Paris Hilton with Google.

It comes as a surprise to many that the UK Civil Procedure Rules include a reference to anything so sophisticated as keyword searches. Paragraph 2A.5 of the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR says this:

It may be reasonable to search some or all of the parties’ electronic storage systems. In some circumstances, it may be reasonable to search for electronic documents by means of keyword searches (agreed as far as possible between the parties) even where a full review of each and every document would be unreasonable. There may be other forms of electronic search that may be appropriate in particular circumstances.

We were discussing this paragraph last night at a meeting of Master Whitaker’s drafting group, in the context of the proposed new e-Disclosure Practice Direction. The point at issue (or one of the points from a meeting lasting four and a half hours) was the need to sanction – indeed, to require in an appropriate case – the use of technology, whilst not implying that technology is all you need.   One issue is that the use of keywords is only one of the many technology solutions which may be applied to the task of finding the “right” set of documents – “right” being a neutral term which I use deliberately here (as we cannot do in the rules) to connote compliance with the definition of a disclosable document in a way which is proportionate.  Our wording must cover developments in search technology which are as yet unknown. Another issue is that technology alone, however sophisticated, is rarely, if ever, enough. You need a brain and the instructions for using it in this context.

LexisNexis debate marks ten years of the CPR

LexisNexis, publishers of the Civil Court Practice 2009 “The Green Book” marked the tenth anniversary of the Civil Procedure Rules with a debate chaired by Lord Neuberger which considered the impact of the CPR and assessed its strengths and weaknesses.

The panel members were:

* Sir Anthony Clarke, Master of the Rolls
* Simon Davis – Clifford Chance
* District Judge Michael Walker
* Professor Michael Zander QC – London School of Economics

The debate was recorded on video and can be found on the LexisNexis web site. It comes in convenient chunks – two sets of short excerpts, some highlights, and the full version (for which user details are required). I have so far watched only the highlights but will certainly go back to the full version.

Irish discovery rules embrace electronic documents

By happy chance, the discovery rules in Ireland have the same number as those in the Civil Procedure Rules of England & Wales. Order 31 of the Rules of the Superior Courts give the court the power to order discovery of documents between parties. You will spot even from that much that there is a difference from the CPR, under which standard disclosure (as we, stupidly, and alone in the world, call it) is the default in the absence of an agreement or order dispensing with it. In Ireland, a case must be made for it – not difficult in principle in most cases, I imagine, but an interesting and subtle difference of approach.

Dropping in to Oxford, dropping out to Paris

The printed description of a software application’s capabilities is no substitute for interaction with the people who are selling it, just as the bare record of historical narrative without people does little to bring a subject alive. People buy from people, not companies, and that means getting out and about. It is not a contradiction to say that a disparate group of people or businesses can best become a cohesive selling proposition by using a web site.

We may look back on the first few years of this century as a short period when international inter-personal communication was at its best. We can cross the world more efficiently and more cheaply than at any time in history, but electronic virtual communication is also extremely sophisticated. From now on, I suspect, we will see physical travel move further out of reach and electronic connections become so advanced that it will be hard to justify actually going to meet the people you do business with. We will lose something as a result – a personal element in business which is valuable.

The thought was prompted by a conjunction of flying visits. Jo Sherman was with us at the weekend. Jo is the founder and CEO of eDiscovery Tools, an Australian software company which specialises in electronic data discovery for litigation and similar purposes. It is quite a feat for a relatively small Australian company to sell software to major UK and US clients. The secret lies in personal relationships which may make use of electronic communication to some extent but which must be kept warm with face-to-face meetings. Her apparent ubiquity – this is the third time I have seen her this year, here or in New York – must be hard work, but it seems to generate business. Looking at other suppliers, I wonder sometimes if the slashing of travel budgets in this industry is being done for the right reasons – a lot of it seems to me to be more a matter of creating a perception of frugality than part of a coherent plan. Marketing people seem to think that their carefully-drafted prose will do the trick on its own. People buy from people, not flyers and brochures.

Political masterclasses in electronic disclosure

Her Majesty’s Government (the poor woman must shudder at the phrase just now) continues to provide an ongoing masterclass in how not to handle electronic disclosure projects.

The week-end’s account by Damian Green MP of the police raid on his home and office would be the more amusing if it was not our civil liberties going down the tubes, as PC Plank rifles through an elected representative’s bed and his love letters to his wife in search of Shami Chakrabarti. It is helpful, I think, to get the basics right – sending your team to surround the right house is always a good start.

The Damian McBride story has also developed nicely for those of us whose interests include both e-mail custodians and politics. There are several other strands from news stories which serve as helpful illustrations for the more prosaic business of giving electronic disclosure in litigation, and I will draw them together shortly.

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Anacomp gets unqualified SAS 70 Type II security certification

Anacomp, which owns the litigation review platform CaseLogistix, has received a full unqualified SAS Type II certification for its hosting and operations centre at Herndon, Virginia. SAS 70 is an auditing standard established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants which allows service organizations to demonstrate they have adequate controls and processes.

You can read the press release to get the details. I do not, on the whole, concern myself with the infrastructure aspects. This is not because they are unimportant – far from it – but because my focus is on the user end, the business and legal context in which an application is used, and on the people who develop and sell it and who support the users.

All the news that’s fit to print from Unfiltered Orange

The source for my story about the US – Swiss Safe Harbor was Unfiltered Orange, the electronic discovery resource run by Rob Robinson for Orange Legal Technologies.

Rob’s then e-discovery blog was the first resource I came across when I began to inform myself about US legal and technical e-discovery developments. We have never met, though we must have been simultaneously in the same place at events like LegalTech, but have corresponded over the years.

The resources available from the Unfiltered Orange page include a weekly update e-mail, Twitter and FaceBook. The update covers the Top 25 eDiscovery stories, and if he happens this week to have put one of mine at the top of his list (Distinguishing workplace spying from data collection), that serves merely as a prompt to do something  I have been meaning to do for some time, and point you towards his site.

Identifying, culling and filtering the world’s e-discovery stories is similar in many ways to the exercises which they describe – there are a lot of them and not all are worth looking for or looking at. I have the luxury of choosing only those which interest me personally. Rob Robinson’s self-imposed brief is rather wider and I am, as always, grateful for the pointers he gives to the stories which matter.

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US – Swiss Safe Harbor

It had escaped my notice that the US Department of Commerce and the Federal Data Protection and Information Commission of Switzerland had established a US – Swiss Safe Harbor Framework. The provisions and procedures are identical to those which apply to data transfers between the EU and the US.

Switzerland understood the commercial, as well as the personal, value of privacy whilst those countries which now make up the European Union were still in that state of near-permanent war which governed their relations for centuries. That war has now been converted into the back-stabbings, media briefings and backstairs jockeying for power which go on in Brussels and Strasbourg, from which Switzerland has stayed aloof.

People outside the EU tend to view it as a single bloc corresponding with its political and geographical boundaries. Whilst that is largely true in global trading terms, the neat picture is muddled by specific national distinctions – each EU country has its own privacy and data protection laws, for example – and is entirely misleading in cultural terms. The picture is confused still further by the fact that Switzerland, sitting bang in the middle of the EU landmass, is not a member of the EU.

Informed comment in the Times adds to the Woolf rules debate

No sooner had I published my post Have the Woolf reforms worked? yesterday when Jonathan Maas flicked me a link to an article in Times Online on the same subject. It is called Sad and unsatisfactory – but not destroyed and is written in his personal capacity by His Honour Judge Charles Harris QC, the Designated Civil Judge for Oxford. Like me, Judge Harris was reacting to an article in the Times of 9 April by Lawrence West QC.

Judge Harris is chairman of the civil committee of the Council of Circuit Judges. I came across him when he was the able convenor at a kind of judicial boot camp last Summer. HHJ Simon Brown QC and I were invited to speak there about electronic disclosure to an audience which included the Master of the Rolls.

The focus in Judge Harris’s article is on the greatly increased complexity seen in the last decade, much of it not merely unnecessary but counter-productive. We have not only seen a great deal of new law, but statute draftsmen seem to have lost the ability to write succinct unambiguous law. The CPR and their Practice Directions have grown in volume (that is, pages), in detail, in prolixity and in their implications for practitioners. The remedy, Judge Harris says, is “greater simplicity, with less prescription and preparatory paperwork”.

Not going to Canada for the second time this month

As you may recall, I was not able to go to a meeting in Toronto at the beginning of April, when Senior Master Whitaker and I had hoped to see Justice Campbell and others to talk about common ground between Canada and the UK on the case management of civil litigation. I am also not going to Montreal next week for the LegalIT 3.0 conference  on 20 and 21 April for the prosaic reason that I have only just found out about it.

Jo Sherman of eDiscovery Tools and the Australian Future Courts Programme is coming here at the week-end so that we can talk about the new Australian Federal Practice Note 17 on the use of technology in the management of discovery and the conduct of litigation which she masterminded and which is relevant to our planned Technology Questionnaire and e-Disclosure Practice Direction. She mentioned that she was en route to a panel presentation in Montreal – the first I had heard of it.

Keeping informed on information about informaton

It is getting hard to keep up. The various aspects of information and justice which I write about are developing faster than I can put quill to keyboard.

I wrote my piece An information war at the week-end and updated it when the video emerged of the policeman beating up a woman at the G20 demonstration before posting it today. This morning’s Times carries a piece to the same effect as my article’s comments about protesters turning the tables on Big Brother state, using information as their weapon. There is also an article in the Times today about policemen invoking the Terrorism Act against a man who photographed them in a park (they have been given some re-education on the subject), one about the Damian Green raid (an over-reaction, apparently, according to the Parliamentary Report of yesterday – you don’t say?), and one about the further fall-out from the Damian McBride affair, with questions being asked about searching e-mails to trace the other recipients of the offending messages. Meanwhile, the European Commission has started legal proceedings against the UK for breach of its obligations to enforce EU data privacy laws.

Pretty well every topic I wrote about has therefore been updated by events. Meanwhile, I have seen a headline about Switzerland signing up to safe harbor, a judge has written in the Times today (as I have here) about the Woolf reforms, and there is a Legal IT conference coming up in Montreal which deserves a write-up. Oh, and there is some work to do as well as all this writing.

Some, at least, of all this will warrant further comment. Mr Justice Jackson, as he then was, referred to the issues in the Wembley Stadium case as being like the Lernean Hydra. That, as I am sure you all know, was a hideous creature which would emerge from its murky swamps and terrorise the people. Every time Hercules struck off a head, two more would grow in its place, so the Hydra was a bit like our civil service (and the murky swamps increasingly a metaphor for Downing Street, come to think of it). As I look at all these multiplying stories around the world which warrant reporting, the Hydra analogy comes to mind. I will try to keep up.

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An information war – making connections between privacy, liberty, policing, law and government

An American e-discovery site put up a link last week to a video showing police brutality. It is not just me, then, who sees connections between apparently diverse aspects of justice. Privacy and the right to go about your business are fast being eroded in Britain. There is a civil war looming, and information will be its weapons. Lawyers and judges will be in the middle of the battlefield.

Gabe’s Guide to the e-discovery universe, an American site dedicated, as this one is, to developments in electronic discovery, put up a link a few days ago to a YouTube video showing a fight at a football stadium in an unidentified country. A man runs across the pitch waving a banner; a squad of policemen bring him down, and one is seen repeatedly punching the already captive protester. The spectators flood the pitch and attack the police, who retreat. The compact between rulers and ruled, which (given their respective numbers) depends on public acceptance of the right of the rulers to impose law and order, has broken down.

We are heading in that direction in Britain. Policemen behave like that because ministers encourage them to think that they and the government which they represent are above the law. A few days ago, a British policeman brutally assaulted a middle-aged man as he walked home from work. The man died a few minutes later. At a memorial protest about that death, another policeman, his identification number deliberately obscured, struck a small woman across the face with a heavily-gloved hand and then thoughtfully and deliberately hit her legs with a telescopic baton. The government and decent policemen (the majority) are as appalled as the rest of us, but it is the government which has created the climate in which a policeman thinks this is the right way to behave. Several elements, tenuously linked to each other, bring us to this.

Have the Woolf reforms worked?

An article in the Times of 9 April had the title Have the Woolf reforms worked? Written by Lawrence West QC, it makes an uncompromising start with the assertion in the first paragraph that “the reforms — known as the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) — have been a disaster for the civil justice system”. The right to access to justice is “illusory” and, judged by this standard, “the CPR have been an abject failure”.

West quotes some figures in support of his view that the number of civil actions in the year after 1999 “plummeted as if pushed off a cliff”. The statistical evidence is supported by this more anecdotal statement:

“Before the CPR, the corridor outside Court 12 in the Royal Courts of Justice, the Bear Garden and the Master’s Corridor heaved with lawyers and their clients waiting hearings. Those places have been wastelands ever since.”

You can guess at my support for this viewpoint from the fact that I long ago chose to give the title “The Empty Bear Garden” to my keynote speech for the 8 June Ark Group e-disclosure conference Practical Guidelines to e-Disclosure Management. The Bear Garden is a space in the RCJ at which several corridors, staircases and doors intersect. It has become a gauge of court activity, like a cardiac monitor in a hospital drama. A cardiac monitor makes a noise, however, when it is flat-lining.

Confounding the expectations of a cynical audience

Susan Boyle, the unlikely-looking star of Britain’s Got Talent, reminds us that first impressions may mislead. You do not know how good something can be unless you see – or, in this case, hear – it. Your cynicism as to e-disclosure, like the judges’ expectations of Miss Boyle, may be founded on some wrong assumptions

It is nearly impossible to sell me something which I did not intend to buy anyway. I am almost immune to impulse buying and am brusque to the point of rudeness with anyone who tries to interest me in something which I did not already have a fixed intention to buy. This, I am told, makes me embarrassing company in New York shops where they simply cannot leave you alone – my son saw one assistant making frantic gestures to head off another who was about to bend my ear with his unsolicited drivel because she had just witnessed me biting the head off the last one who interrupted my train of thought. I hang up on cold-callers who do not deliver a compelling message in ten seconds (sorry all you Indian scanning and coding salesmen) and try and avoid going into my bank now that every cashier is on commission if they manage to sell me something.

This attitude dates from the time when I was IT partner at a large firm of solicitors. Every bloody salesman in London would ring me up just to see if I had changed my mind since the last time I told him to sod off. I know what you are selling, I would say, and as and when I want something like it, I know where to find you. That is not bad training for being on the other side of the fence, where my role now is try and persuade lawyers at least to take a look at the sort of things which litigation applications can do. Lawyers are cynical about attempts to impress them; they think they know what to expect from a demonstration; they are pretty sure that they are not interested and that they will not be made any more so when the salesman opens his mouth.

Distinguishing workplace spying from data collection

It is usually possible to reconcile employees’ legitimate privacy concerns and a company’s equally legitimate rights and obligations to collect data if you go about it properly. A story in Der Spiegel shows what happens when you get it wrong. The story does at least give an opportunity to explain the difference between spy software and data collection.

As its name implies, the e-Disclosure Information Project, which I run, exists to spread knowledge and understanding about the collection and use of electronic documents. My primary focus is on the common law countries (mainly the UK and US) which require discovery of documents in litigation, but the increase in the powers of regulators brings the same issues to countries which do not have that litigation obligation. The area where mainland EU principles collide with US discovery is in relation to privacy and data protection matters. I come across these subjects mainly in the context of trying to explain to Americans what the concepts mean, why they matter rather more to Europeans than to them, and how proper regard to privacy is not necessarily incompatible with an adequate collection of data if they take the trouble to understand both the legislation and the underlying concerns which drive the legislation.

Taking the Administrative Courts to the regions

The Times of 9 April carried an interview with Sir Anthony May, President of the Queen’s Bench Division. Its title London-centric? We are taking power to the people conveys the gist of the article. The Administrative Court is to soon to open in Birmingham, Cardiff, Leeds and Manchester.

The Administrative Court handles a wide range of cases with a public law element – immigration and asylum matters, claims against central and local government and against regulatory bodies, as well as certain child care and prisoners’ rights cases. Setting up regional centres has obvious merit from the court’s own point of view – it has become grossly overburdened with, at one point, files stacked in cases in the corridor and a long waiting list of applications awaiting allocation to a judge. There are obvious advantages too from the applicants’ perspective – many of the claims, by their nature, are made by people who cannot afford the additional costs incurred in travelling to London, quite apart from the fact that claims involving, say, a local authority and one of its residents are better heard close to where they both come from.

Autonomy appoints Robert Webb QC as non-executive chairman

Autonomy Corporation Plc has appointed Robert Webb QC as its Non-Executive Chairman with effect from 1 May 2009.

Robert Webb was General Counsel at British Airways from 1998 until recently. He practised at the Bar from 1971, becoming Queen’s Counsel, Head of Chambers at 5 Bell Yard and a Crown Court Recorder. He holds a range of other posts, including non-executive directorships at the BBC and the London Stock Exchange. Autonomy’s CEO, Dr Mike Lynch, said of him that “his experience in litigation, regulatory and compliance issues is directly relevant to our current commercial focus”.

The appointment is a reminder that Autonomy is a British company in origin, with dual headquarters in Cambridge and in San Francisco. Those of us whose focus is on the relatively narrow world of litigation and regulation may also overlook the fact that this is only one of the areas in which Autonomy’s enterprise search applications are used by corporations and government departments and agencies.

One of my former partners used to instruct him often, mainly on aviation matters, and his name is familiar from that as well as from his high-profile role at BA. His twenty five years at the Commercial Bar followed by a broad range of roles in industry make him a good choice for his new role at Autonomy.

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Welcome to FTI Technology as a sponsor of the e-Disclosure Information Project

It is very good to welcome FTI Technology as a sponsor of the e-Disclosure Information Project. FTI Technology is a segment of FTI Consulting, Inc., a global business advisory firm, and brings immense resources to bear on the acquisitions and the software development needed to produce a world-class platform for disclosure / discovery.

As usual, I see no point in copy-typing or edit-pasting the perfectly good prose of a well-written press release, and refer you to FTI’s announcement of 27 January 2009 which sets out succinctly what FTI have done with their two flagship electronic discovery acquisitions Attenex and Ringtail Legal. Put shortly, they have integrated the advanced analysis, clustering, rapid review and graphical visualisation strengths of Attenex and the review, redaction and production capabilities of Ringtail.

In layman’s terms (since, as I say, you can read the formal descriptions for yourself) Attenex ploughs through large (very large if that is what you have) data collections, and helps identify material you either want to discard or to review, serving it up in batches. The clustering and visualisation tools allow quick overviews in a form which allows the reviewer to drill down to document level if necessary and to make decisions which both carry through into the detailed review stage and inform decisions about subsequent batches of documents. Ringtail Legal allows you move straight on to the detailed review without having to move the data between applications.

KordaMentha picks EnCase from Guidance Software for Australian eDiscovery

Like sport and so much else, the idea of proving a legal case by discovery of documents is an old English concept which was adopted wherever the English had a hand in establishing a system of law. America kept it when it dumped our tea, our taxes and our King. Australia adopted it with the same enthusiasm as it adopted cricket. A couple of weeks ago, Hong Kong was host to both the Rugby Sevens and our Senior Master Whitaker talking about UK disclosure developments. Discovery is central to Canadian litigation, and Master Whitaker is due to speak about it in Singapore later in the year.

Three things unite all these countries apart from their common law heritage. The problems raised by electronic disclosure are the same everywhere; those of us involved in developing rules and best practices around the world all speak to each other; and there is a handful of suppliers whose applications are used wherever electronic data must be collected and handled for litigation or for regulatory investigation. The resulting cross-fertilisation has obvious benefits – what works in one place will probably work in another, and if an approach tried in one country is seen to have failed, then it is as well to know about it before another jurisdiction goes down the same track. The things I talk about in Birmingham or Bristol are informed by what I Iearn in Sydney or New York, and it would perhaps surprise UK judges and lawyers to know how much interest there is in those places in what happens in the UK.

Electronic Working Pilot Scheme

I have not had the chance to read it yet, but Practice Direction (Electronic Working Pilot Scheme) supplementing rule 5.5 of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998 provides for a pilot scheme by which, in the circumstances set out in the practice direction, proceedings may be started and all subsequent steps may be taken electronically (“Electronic Working”).

The pilot runs from 1 April to 31 March 2010, applies to claims started on or after 1st April 2009, and will operate in the Admiralty, Commercial and London Mercantile Courts of the High Court at the Royal Courts of Justice, with the possibility of extending the operation of the pilot scheme to other courts.

This looks one of the more interesting developments since the CPR was launched, when the electronic filing functions now being piloted were (or so it seemed) muddled in the official mind with the very different concept of electronic disclosure of documents between parties under Part 31 CPR.

More when I have had the chnace to read it properly.

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NERDI and ClearGuideAutoKrolLexFTios

The e-discovery 2.0 blog scored an exclusive with a recent post. Under the heading Government Launches Bold New Recovery Effort, it reported the nationalisation of the US electronic discovery industry. A new authority, the National Electronic Discovery Institute (NERDI) was apparently set up with a new portal at EDiscovery.gov with effect from 1 April. In response, the Socha-Gelbmann Top 5 has consolidated under the name ClearGuideAutoKrolLexFTios.

It is faintly disturbing that this could easily be read from top to bottom without a blink. Tom Lehrer famously said that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger made satire obsolete.  How can a mere spoof compete with the daily news at the moment? How about “Home Secretary claims 88p bath plug and her family’s porn viewing from taxpayer”? That particular (true) item is rivalled only by one yet more risible from a while back: “Brown appoints Jacquie Smith as Home Secretary”.  How funny is that? (not very, actually, if you value liberty, privacy and the right to sleep soundly at night, but that is for another article).

Discovering inspiration from heroes of the past

My primary topic, electronic discovery or electronic disclosure, is a sub-set of a wider subject – more than one wider subject, indeed. It is important as a matter of simple business efficiency; it is critical to the subject of access to justice, which matters as much to large corporations as it does to ordinary individuals; and it is fascinating (to me anyway) as an example of technology being applied to move the world on. It is not the pure science – my Grade 9 in Physics with Chemistry O Level was well-deserved – but the conjunction of human endeavour and technology being applied to practical problems which interests me. I may describe some of the e-disclosure applications as “near-magical in their capabilities”, but I stress also that the most important technology lies between your ears.

I have had a couple of days away. If what you come here for is undiluted e-disclosure then you will have to wait – there are posts coming up on subjects as narrow and varied as TREC and search technology, on privacy and German works councils, on Special Masters and on other e-discovery topics. Today concerns wider matters, although the theme – that you can do almost anything if you really want to and have the tools to do it – applies as much to managing litigation as it did to the esoteric examples which have come my way in the past few days.

Welcome to Legal Inc as e-Disclosure Information Project sponsor

I am delighted to welcome Legal Inc as a sponsor of the e-Disclosure Information Project, joining a group which is increasingly representative of the full range of e-disclosure suppliers and service providers.

Legal Inc was set up by Lisa Burton and Dipak Patel. Lisa is a law graduate and Dipak brought technical expertise, the two elements needed to bring technology to lawyers. Legal Inc describes itself as a “full-service one-stop shop” in the field of litigation support. That means that they can take on the whole or any part of a litigation support, e-disclosure and information management project for law firms or corporate clients, working with specialist partners for those things which they do not do themselves.

I see little point in doing a précis of Legal Inc’s services when their web site does that perfectly well for itself (which is not, I should say, true of all the players in this market). Take the litigation support link and skim the Overview | Challenges | Approaches | Benefits pages for a pretty good idea of what Legal Inc offers.