7Safe blogs to keep us informed about e-disclosure forensics

E-disclosure Information Project sponsor 7Safe has joined the growing number of businesses using a blog to pass on information about what it does and what is happening in the company. It is a powerful and cheap marketing medium whatever you are promoting.

It will not surprise you to know that I believe strongly in the role of blogging as a means of conveying business information. My blog began as a backup resource to my website, a place, as I pictured it, where I could drop snippets of information without the relative formality and structure which a website requires. It speedily became my main output platform, a place where I sometimes put thousands of words each week. Although I intended it primarily as a feeder for my website, most of the traffic in fact goes the other way, with my website acting as an index to recent blog articles. I do the same for a law firm client and am about to start another. It works.

Who needs a bridge when the river goes away?

The mechanics of electronic disclosure are not an inherently legal function like Will writing or conveyancing. Instead of assuming that the work will always be theirs, lawyers must ask themselves why the clients should not divert it somewhere else.

There is something comforting about the certainty that you will always be needed. Doctors can always be reasonably sure of a steady flow of patients. Farmers and others engaged in food production know that people will always need to eat. It is not yet foreseeable that we will do without some form of energy piped into our homes. Fashions in clothes may change but we will always need something to wear.

Many apparent certainties, however, do not in fact last for ever. An article in last week’s paper predicts the end of fixed line telephony. A petrol station or roadside inn finds that its busy road is bypassed. I live between a canal, the latest thing in transportation when it opened in 1790, and the railway line opened in 1846 which killed canal trade overnight. Sometimes the need for a skill set drops away – a Western doctor specialising in, say, cholera, rickets and consumption came to need new areas of specialisation.

The need to handle torrents of documents has historically generated floods of work for lawyers,  subsidising other areas of the firm’s practice such as the delivery of high value advice from their expensive offices as big cases brought big disclosure exercises and the opportunity to turn their assistants’ hours into large bills. What, however, if document handling flows away to others?