The e-discovery black box

I am not sure how they keep the standard up, but CaseCentral has been publishing a constant stream of cartoons about e-discovery which must have done wonders for their profile. If I copied every one I liked, I would by now have run out of my allocation of storage space.

A recent one called The e-discovery black box encapsulates well the lawyer’s understanding of what goes on between asking “the system” a question and getting the answer. Charles Christian has beaten me to its republication, and it is easier to link to his copy than to make my own.

Home

How big is the London e-disclosure market?

I may have brought you here under false pretences. I have no idea how big the London e-disclosure market is and I do not think that anyone else does either. I occasionally hear confident assertions suggesting that there is either much more or much less e-disclosure going on than people think but, since the starting point for these relative assessments is never specified, it is hard to deduce what “much more” or “much less” actually means. There is much less here than there is in America, but the same is true (for different reasons) of caribou and McDonald’s outlets. It is a statement of the obvious, rather than a valuable piece of market intelligence.

Sugaring the e-disclosure pill

My adverse comments on a post by an e-disclosure blogger known only as 585 bring reactions from Craig Ball and from 585 himself. What level of debate gets the messages across? Politics shows us how easily we can turn people off a subject.

You can track the course of the sun by the flow of the e-mails. First you get the Australians at the end of their day. England gradually wakes up and then, in the late morning, the first messages start coming in from America’s east coast. By the end of our working day, when English e-disclosure cyberspace has only me and Jonathan Maas in it, the west coast of America is in full flow. Then, before I go to bed, Australia starts again. So regular is this relationship between the sun and the e-mail traffic, that to get a message from Austin, Texas, at breakfast time makes you wonder if Phaëton had not once again taken the reins of his father’s chariot and driven the sun off course (oops, sorry, a few days’ immersion in the language of Sir Rupert Jackson’s report, as I have just had, and classical allusions start popping up everywhere).

Jan Eyck: The Fall of Phaëton

It was not Phaëton burning up the earth, but the doyen of America’s ediscovery commentators, Craig Ball, burning the candle at both ends. He had read my post Well-justified anonymity of Jackson commentator. To recap, that article was about an anonymous blogger, known only as 585, whose comments on Lord Justice Jackson’s 650 page Preliminary Report on civil litigation costs included a 625 word exposition on the proper way to disclose PSTs (Sir Rupert had apparently fallen short of the standards to be expected of a senior judge in his mention of this subject) and a disquisition on the imponderables which arise when estimating e-disclosure costs which, again, suggested to 585 that his lordship’s technical grasp was not as good as – well, as 585′s own grasp. Other articles were rather too free, to my eye, with imputations of incompetence on the part of lawyers and consultants involved in e-disclosure cases. 585′s article is called Electronic Discovery: Lord Jackson Report.