A judgment by Senior Assistant Registrar Yeong Zee Kin in the Singapore High Court last week shows the commonality in court-led management of e-Discovery between common law jurisdictions. The case is Deutsche Bank AG v Chang Tse Wen and others [2010] SGHC 125 and it concerns the Electronic Discovery Practice Direction 3/2009 which came into effect in Singapore on 1 October 2009. Master Whitaker and I were there a few days later, and Yeong Zee Kin was a speaker at that conference. What he says in his judgment was foreshadowed by what he said at the conference.
Before turning to the judgment itself, I take this opportunity to emphasise how small this world is quite apart from the commonality between the laws and practices in each place. The judgment was delivered on 26 April. I found out about it on 28th of April because Serena Lim of BiziBody in Singapore tweeted about it. I re-tweeted it, passed the link to a few people with a specific interest in the practice directions of other jurisdictions, and put it into my “things to write about” queue. This morning, Aaron Bleasdale of Epiq Systems in Hong Kong dropped me a line to make sure that I had seen it. Yeong Zee Kin and I are both speakers at the InnoXcell eDiscovery conference in Hong Kong on the 7 and 8 July. This combination of formal judgments cross-referring between jurisdictions, instant and worldwide communication, international conference platforms, and active interest from all over the place speaks for itself.
The judgment involves a not uncommon story of one party keen to give disclosure electronically whilst the other is not, apparently on the basis that he was already poised to give disclosure on paper and considered that e-Discovery would multiply his costs. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Chris Dale 
