London litigation support all gathers in one pub

A large pub gathering of most of the London litigation support industry prompts some thoughts on the state of the industry and on what makes a buyer new to the market choose one supplier rather than another

If the Larder in Clerkenwell had collapsed last night, almost the whole of the UK litigation support industry would have gone with it. Bill Onwusah of Lovells, whose idea it was, thought he was being optimistic in reckoning that 25 people might turn up in response to his invitation for “an evening of convivial conversation”. As the evening began, he revised the estimate to 45. We all lost count, but the final figure was much higher than that. What probably drew in the crowds was the rider “if you can’t manage anything convivial we will settle for an evening of the usual backbiting and sniping”.

PosseList wrapup of the Masters Conference

The PosseList has managed to get out a full report of the Masters Conference and the first part of its notes on ACC Boston whilst I have yet to note up either Judge Facciola’s eleoquent keynote address at the Masters Conference or anything about the LexisNexis conference in Singapore.

My excuse, if such be needed, is that there is only one of me and that the inordinate amount of time spent on aeroplanes recently cuts into the writing time. I do not, in any event, lay claim to journalistic timeliness. Besides, as I have already noted, Patrick Burke of Guidance Software has already written up Judge Facciola’s speech and the judicial panel at the Masters Conference and now we have the PosseList’s Masters Conference wrap-up. As that makes clear, they had “various reporters” at the conference which meant they could attend sessions which ran parallel to each other.

The Orange Rag adds its weight to litigation support on both sides of the Atlantic

I wonder what was the first legal technology development reported by Charles Christian. A new design of quill pen perhaps which, coupled with a revolutionary advance in parchment development, allowed legal clerks to write on both sides of a document at once. It might have been the outsourcing of Inner Temple deed production to monks recently made redundant by the nationalisation of the monasteries, or a steam-driven calculating machine for keeping trust accounts.

His acerbic observations on the legal technology market have been pouring out apparently for ever. His audience is legal IT professionals — the people who develop, sell, buy, implement, support and manage legal IT systems within law firms and in-house legal departments. It is unlikely that any medium-to-large law firm technology purchase in the UK has taken place without reference to the Legal Technology Insider and, more recently, the Orange Rag blog.

Earles v Barclays Bank reported in the Times

Earles v Barclays Bank was reported in The Times today with the heading Disclosing electronic data.

I have already written about this (see Costs penalty for non-compliance with e-disclosure obligations). It is significant at several levels: unlike Digicel it is a fairly ordinary case; it is firmly grounded in authorities about evidence and not merely about disclosure or electronic disclosure; it covers the use of disproportionately expensive lawyers as well as procedural defects; perhaps most importantly, it is a case where documentary evidence would have proved immediately what it took much oral evidence to show, possibly allowing the case to be dealt with on a summary basis. The disclosure defects did actually cost time,  money and court time.

Spitting on the deck of the CPR

Unintended consequences are not necessarily unforeseeable. It was wholly predictable that the pre-issue obligations of the 1999 Civil Procedure Rules would shift the battleground to the front end of the litigation, and with obvious consequences in costs. As with the notoriously hard-fought US discovery process, if the rules give a weapon to the lawyers, then their duty is to use it. Lord Woolf seems a bit miffed, but has more to contribute to the debate than his reported attacks imply.

When Stanley Baldwin retired as Prime Minister and handed over to Neville Chamberlain, he promised “not to spit on the deck nor speak to the man at the wheel”. If Lord Woolf’s only contribution to the current debate were to come down from his lair every often and attack those who follow in his footsteps, then he would do better to stay at home. He has more to offer us than that.

Woolf recently attacked lawyers, judges and the government at a meeting of the London Solicitors Litigation Association, saying that they are all to blame for the fact that we have not seen the hoped-for reduction in litigation costs. Costs have in fact risen, putting litigation beyond the reach of all but the richest.

When is an EDD quotation like a cold beer?

These posts sometimes acquire a life of their own in the writing especially where, as with this one, they are done in stages across a rather long day. What began as an account of my last day in Singapore turns into the observation that EDD quotations are like a cold beer on a hot day – if you really need it right now then you may have to pay more for it.

Up at 4.00am this morning [Friday], for no more obvious reason than that my internal clock was unsure what time zone it was in. It had probably caught up with Washington, but was actually now in Singapore – but not for much longer. I stayed awake throughout the second day of the conference (just as well really, since I was chairing it – how embarrassing would that be?) and went out for blameless suppers with Browning Marean, followed by early nights, respectably ignoring the fact that Singapore has a larger number of very beautiful girls than any city I have been in. It is probably that which has caught up with me (early nights, I mean, not being respectable). If you go to bed four hours earlier than usual then you wake up four hours earlier. Nothing to do with time zones.

The British invade Washington again, this time to talk and learn, not burn

To say that electronic discovery is international connotes more than the cross-border ramifications of multi-jurisdictional litigation. There is commonality in the problems, the rules and the solutions, to say nothing of the implications for law firms of new ways of working. The Masters Conference was an opportunity to explore many of them.

My ambition to report on the Masters Conference in Washington before reaching the LexisNexis e-discovery conference in Singapore was defeated by various things – only so many hours in the day for one thing, and no power sockets on the planes. As I begin writing this, it is 4.00am in Singapore a week later and the conference here has been and gone.

British liberties viewed from the Land of the Free

The subject of liberty came at me in three different ways on a single Sunday morning in Washington a few days ago. The top article in the Washington Post was headed “In today’s viral world, who keeps a civil tongue” and concerns what it referred to as “the rules of civil discourse”, specifically in relation to the freedom to say what you please. I went to the Arlington National Cemetery, and gazed on the thousands who lie buried there who fought for our freedom. My way back was blocked by a march demanding gay equality, and specifically the freedom of people of the same sex to marry.

Next stop Singapore for LexisNexis E-Discovery Conference

Practice Direction No 3 of 2009 in the Supreme Court of Singapore is entitled Discovery and Inspection of Electronically Stored Information and took effect on 1 October 2009. I am off to Singapore today to take part in a conference organised by LexisNexis with the title e-Discovery & Digital Forensics.

My own subject, it will not surprise you to know, is International Parallels in e-Discovery. I aim to distil what has come out of the US-UK judicial panels which we have now done in both London and Washington and which have picked out what is best and worst from both jurisdictions. The words competence, co-operation and proportionality will inevitably feature in my speech as they do, expressly or by implication, in the new Practice Direction.

Big reception for Marean-Dale video

Browning Marean and I made two short videos at ILTA09 with Kina Kim of PivotalDiscovery. The “big reception” in my title refers to the venue rather than the reaction, but this means of conveying information is well worth doing.

Years ago, back in the late 1980s, I attended a video presentation course with my then law firm partners. The idea was not to prepare us to appear in moving pictures but to improve our general presentation skills by showing us where we went wrong when speaking in public. My own weakness, I discovered, lay not in how I looked when being filmed, but in what I did when I was merely in the background. I realised that I fiddled constantly, scratching imaginary itches, rubbing the side of my nose and generally moving about all the time. When I first stood in front of audiences, I had to remember to remove everything from my pockets to make sure that I did not jangle keys and coins whilst speaking.

I have kicked that last one, I think, but my most recent video appearance shows up a new bad habit – continuous hand gestures like a demented weather girl signing for the deaf whilst warning of stormy weather ahead.

Discovery explorers need a map

You can kill an analogy with overuse, just as every cliché was once a clever new phrase. Describing e-discovery / e-Disclosure in terms of explorers and maps, however, does not become hackneyed, because exploration itself continues to excite and because it works very well as a parallel.

Each nation has its own stirring examples, and they come from all over the place. What do I get if I take the first ones which come to mind? Mallory and Tenzing climbing Everest in the year I was born. Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in Tutankhamen’s tomb. Sir Walter Raleigh in Virginia and South America. Scott, Shackleton and the others in the snowy wastes of Antarctica (I have a soft spot for Sir Vivian Fuchs, leader of the first overland crossing of Antarctica in 1958, if only for the newspaper headline “Vivian Fuchs off to Antarctica”). Doctor Livingstone greeted by HM Stanley in an African clearing. The use of maps necessarily implies that someone else has been there first, but is no less interesting – I have just bought a large-scale ordnance survey map of England in digital form so that I can scroll across it as we drive (as my wife drives, I should say), so interested am I in the landscape through which we pass.

If you are American, you do not need to go abroad to find stirring examples of exploration, and many of them are more or less in your own backyard. The names which come to mind are those of Lewis and Clark, whose expedition of 1804 to 1806 was the first overland exploration to the Pacific coast and back. That had a political and commercial purpose going beyond mere exploration for its own sake, since the US was in the process of undertaking the Louisiana Purchase, and neither it nor the French who were selling it, knew how big the acquisition was. We now know that it comprises about 23% of the modern US.

I am brought to this apparently random line of thought by a reference in Tom O’Connor’s recently published Top 10 EDD Tips for General Counsel, which can be found on the Law Technology News website (the second article on that page) and were the subject of Tom’s Masters Conference webcast. One which caught my eye was Point 5 which reads:

Talk to your IT department. They know how to make the map. You are Lewis and Clark, they are Sacajawea. You absolutely cannot navigate without them.

A pit-stop before the last lap

There is a little BlackBerry buzz in my pocket as I put my key in the door after flying sleepless overnight from Washington. Are you happy with the eleven podcasts, the message asks, and can we do a synopsis for each? She must have a trip-wire or something to tip her off that I am home. Oh, and by the way, she adds, don’t forget the article you promised. It is just as well they are asleep in Singapore, or there would be a message asking for my slides for my presentation there next week.

I have brought back four or five draft articles about Washington and the excellent Masters Conference there, ranging from one which needs only its hyperlinks added through to others which consist merely of scrappy notes on paper or in my head. They range from idle chatter about the US-UK e-discovery scene to serious stuff about sanctions and the UK practice direction. I also have a white paper to start, the blurb for a video presentation to write, a pocket full of business cards to go through, 254 e-mails to file, a bill or two to render, a couple of potential sponsors to follow up, part of a book chapter to edit, a telephone interview to give, and a bag full of clothes to get ready for the next trip to Heathrow on Monday.

Off to the Masters Conference in Washington DC

I have gone to the Masters Conference in Washington DC.

See Packed programme for Masters Conference.

I am there until Wednesday evening, staying at the Willard Hotel.

See you there.

Home

Costs penalty for non-compliance with e-disclosure obligations

A judgment given yesterday by His Honour Judge Simon Brown QC sitting as an Additional High Court Judge in the Birmingham Mercantile Court, will focus minds on the need to comply with the requirements of Part 31 CPR and the Practice Direction to Part 31 CPR when giving disclosure.

The case is Earles v Barclays Bank Plc in which the successful Defendant was penalised in its costs recovery after failing to observe the requirements of the disclosure rules. The judge was at pains to stress that there was no intent to conceal documents and that the omissions were the result of incorrect decisions as to the proportionality of the scope of search. The focus is not on the rules for their own sake but on the fact that if the Defendant’s disclosure had been conducted properly, then not only would much time have been saved at trial but a summary judgment application might have been successful.

Packed programme for Masters Conference

The 2009 Masters Conference takes place in Washington on 12 and 13 October. Its title, Global Corporate Change – Navigating Discovery, Risk and Security covers only a fraction of the subjects covered in two days.

The best part for me last year, and the main reason I went, was a keynote speech by US Magistrate Judge John Facciola which I reported at length (see Leadership in Litigation). This took the debate beyond court rules and litigation technology and up into the importance of the court as a component of society. There is a direct line between competence and the efficient use of technology (on the one hand) and access to justice (on the other). Lawyers, judges, and governments which do not to make the courts accessible to everybody are not just failing their clients, the parties appearing before them or those whom they govern. Judge Facciola has the knack of making these things sound not just worthy sentiments but objectives directly related to our daily work.

What makes this job interesting is the breadth, from the minutiae of data handling to matters of state policy. There is almost no corner of the field which is not touched on in the course of the two day conference. If I pick out just the sessions from the program on the entirely random basis that I know the speakers, that is enough to give you the flavour of it.

Posse List post profiles Project

I find myself in the unusual position of being the subject of a blog post rather than the writer. I was interviewed in Brussels last week by Gregory Bufithis of the Posse List which describes itself accurately as “your source for news, commentary and trends in the contract legal market”.

The venue was IQPC’s Brussels eDisclosure Conference, and the resulting post IQPCs Brussels focus: ChrisDale and the e-Disclosure Information Project serves as a better history of the e-Disclosure Information Project than I have written for myself. That matters only because it illustrates how far the electronic discovery world has moved in two years and, in particular, how views and information are being shared around the world. The problems are the same, and no longer merely in jurisdictions with a history of common law discovery. The solutions, and in particular the technology solutions, developed for civil litigation purposes, are readily applied to regulatory investigations and to internal purposes such as fraud investigation.

Scottish Civil Courts Review

One of my aims this evening was to knock out a few words on those parts of the newly-published Report of the Scottish Civil Courts Review as relate to case management and disclosure of documents, before moving on to one of the many other topics which warrant discussion.

Two hours later, I have done no more than draft an appreciation of its broad approach to mediation, case management and the use of technology and have run out of time and space for the section on documents as evidence.  It is good, thoughtful stuff, but even though I skipped the sections which do not concern me, the evening has gone.

Information retention at e-Disclosure conference in Brussels

I demonstrated my own commitment to information retention by mislaying my notes of the sessions at IQPC’s Information Retention and E-Disclosure Management Europe Conference in Brussels last week. As with all the best document retention policies, this means that I do not have to wade through masses of information and can focus instead only on that which is important – “important” in this context meaning what I can remember. It is reasonable to assume, perhaps, that the bits I remember are those which mattered most.

Patrick Burke and Judge Peck

We kicked off with a judicial panel moderated by Patrick Burke, Senior Director and Assistant General Counsel at Guidance Software. Patrick is one of the relatively few in the US who “gets” the idea that, however sophisticated the US legal system may be in many respects, those who do business in a multinational context must take notice of jurisdictional differences. Rather too many assume that things are much the same over here if you shout and wave your arms about.

Service of UK proceedings via Twitter

The UK High Court’s recent permission to serve an injunction via Twitter may be a first, but it has respectable antecedents and the authority of the rules.

The relevant part of Rule 6.15 CPR says this:

(1) Where it appears to the court that there is a good reason to authorise service by a method or at a place not otherwise permitted by this Part, the court may make an order permitting service by an alternative method or at an alternative place.

(2) On an application under this rule, the court may order that steps already taken to bring the claim form to the attention of the defendant by an alternative method or at an alternative place is good service.

(3) An application for an order under this rule –

(a) must be supported by evidence; and

(b) may be made without notice.

Technology and constitutional protection at the Supreme Court

Readers will know that the defence of our democratic rights vies for my attention with efficient case management and the use of technology in litigation. The new Supreme Court combines both of these interests.

There is a story of a former Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, who wished to speak to an MP called Neil whom he had espied in the public corridors of the House of Lords, and ran after him calling his name. Hailsham was, so the story goes, in full fig of robes and garters then worn by the Lord Chancellor. What would you do, as a tourist in that august and severe building, if an authoritative-looking man so dressed ran by shouting “Neil” in a commanding voice? They did as they were told.

Hailsham left office in 1974, so the story is not that old. Much has changed since then in the House of Lords – the hereditary peers have nearly all been expelled; the Lord Chancellor (a member of the government) surrendered the right to sit as a judge;  he is now not a Lord at all but a dull little man in a suit from the House of Commons, following a botched attempt to abolish the post in 2003; and now the separation of executive and judicial powers is complete with the removal of the national court of last resort to a Supreme Court on the other side of Parliament Square.

Learning in good company at IQPC e-Disclosure Conference in Brussels

I got back late on Thursday from IQPC’s Information Retention and E-Disclosure Management Europe conference in Brussels. I was on three panels on the first day, attended several others, met or re-met countless people, and yet seemed in retrospect to have spent most of the time eating and drinking. You will forgive me if this post deals with impressions rather than detail.

It is hard to convey how enjoyable these conferences can be. The concentration of raw information and informed comment into two days is not incompatible with having a good time. No one goes just for the pleasurable side, but you do not need to be an information management junkie to enjoy it, whether in the session rooms, in the networking breaks between formal sessions, and in the restaurants and bars afterwards.

Chris Dale at IQPC Brussels

I will write about some of the sessions separately, and this post is just an overview to give a broad impression for those who have not yet attended one of these conferences. IQPC do them better than most, and months of serious planning goes into them. Of course, if your company has no electronic documents or if your litigation department clients foresee no need to sue, and no risk of being sued or being visited by a regulator, then an e-disclosure conference is not for you. For anyone else, it is a cost-effective way of catching up with what is going on, in pleasant surroundings and congenial company. If part of the appeal is hearing from those who do know about the subject – the legal, practical and technological aspects – another, and under-rated, aspect is the opportunity to mix with those whose knowledge, or lack of it, is no higher than your own.