Goodale v MoJ now has a proper neutral citation number

Senior Master Whitaker’s important judgment in Goodale v Ministry of Justice now has a proper neutral citation number. It is 2009 EWHC 3834 (QB) Handed Down: 5 November 2009. The Claim No is HQ06X03876. Thanks to Master Whitaker for passing this information on.

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How much does a lawyer need to know about electronic documents?

We all make judgements, conscious or otherwise, about the degree of skill or knowledge we need to acquire to conduct our business or, indeed, for everyday living. A number of factors dictate how much we feel that we need to know, ranging from professional qualifications to what excites our interest or curiosity.

We like to think that the chap who hovers over us with a scalpel has acquired a minimum amount of both book-learning and practical experience, and there are interesting NHS statistics which suggest, unsurprisingly, that particular types of operation have more successful outcomes in hospitals which do more of them. If you run a business, then the fact that VAT is inherently dull is no excuse for not knowing at least enough to keep your VAT returns in order. If you drive a car, you need to know the rules of the road and have some idea of the mechanical actions needed to make the car go and, more importantly, to stop.

Some things which are of great importance to others can safely be ignored. I gather, for example, that some Italian has just taken eleven English ball-kicking experts to Africa to highlight the inadequacy of Uruguayan opticians – a worthy endeavour, no doubt, and one which appears to obsess many people, but I do not feel that my life is much diminished by my ignorance of the subject. Not everyone would agree, on the other hand, with my view that everyone ought to know something of the politics of their own country – it is not necessary to be a political activist, or even to have an opinion, but one ought to know broadly what differentiates one party from another and what the issues are. The playwright Tom Stoppard, applying for a job on a newspaper, felt that he ought to express an interest in politics. Asked who the Home Secretary was, his reaction was “I said I was interested in politics, not that I was obsessed by it”. This line from ignorance through interest to obsession turns up in every area of life.

Legal Inc offers secondment of litigation support personnel

Although most providers of litigation support services make their consultants available to law firms to help with projects, Legal Inc has gone one further and effectively set up its own recruitment arm, offering litigation support personnel at all levels.

The service, called Incterim, is described here. Although expressed primarily in terms of enabling firms with existing litigation support staff to cope with peaks and troughs, there is a big opportunity here for firms with no existing resources or experience to take on jobs for which they might otherwise feel disqualified because of the technical and procedural implications of handling even modest amounts of electronic documents.

Firms are rightly wary of stepping into the unknown, yet cannot justify the employment of full-time staff specialising in electronic disclosure. Many of the recent cases can be classified as “incompetence cases” in which significant costs and reputational consequences flowed from relatively simple mistakes or from a failure to apply the right resources at the right time.

Legal Inc’s initiative seems a good way of drawing attention to the fact that skilled people can be engaged at short notice for whatever period is needed to keep the right side of the rules and to understand what technology is available. The hard part is not in fact either of these, but lies in the lack of informed project management skills.

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Publication of 2nd Edition of Butterworths on Electronic Evidence

The only book in my office, apart from battered copies of the Concise Oxford Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus, is the first edition of Butterworths’ Electronic Evidence.  When I got it, I had no particular interest in discovery anywhere but in the UK (which is why my business is called the e-Disclosure Information Project, not “e-Discovery”) and I rather ignored the non-UK sections which comprise the bulk of the book. It saved me from embarrassment on the day it arrived – I was doing a live webinar and did not know the answer to a question thrown at me by a delegate; a quick scrabble through the index gave me something to say.

I made contact with its General Editor, barrister Stephen Mason who, in due course, invited me to contribute to a chapter in the second edition. That has just been published, which is why the subject comes up now.

My bit is the England & Wales part of Chapter 7 The Practical Management of Electronic Evidence, in which my co-contributors include people I know like Sandra Potter from Australia, Dominic Jaar from Canada and M James Daley (of Sedona fame) from the US. Other contributors whom I know or have met include Iain Mitchell QC (Scotland), Seamus Byrne (Australia) and Bryan Tan (Singapore). The introduction is by Chan Sek Keong, Chief Justice of Singapore.

Dales around the World

If you come across a good-looking young Englishman in your American city who says his name is Dale and that he comes from Oxford, it is not me – not this week, anyway. My second son Tom is in the US with his girlfriend Nom. They reached San Francisco yesterday and then go on to Washington and New York.

Such a rencontre is, of course, unlikely, but stranger things have happened. We once met a girl at a legal party in London who told us about the strange people who had left an egg in the fridge of a house she was cleaning at a holiday cottage in the Dordogne. She had no way of knowing that we had ever been to the Dordogne still less, as a few questions about places and dates quickly established, that we were the culprits. The double chance – that we should meet this girl and that she should tell us this obscure story – has left me willing to accept the possibility of almost any coincidental meeting. So keep an eye out for Tom.

As he reaches the East Coast, I will be arriving in Hong Kong for the InnoXcell ediscovery conference. No coincidence will be needed there to meet up with several people I know: US Magistrate Judge Andrew Peck, Senior Master Whitaker, Vince Neicho of Allen & Overy, Senior Assistant Registrar Yeong Zee Kin of Singapore, Greg Wildisen of Epiq Systems and Browning Marean of DLA Piper will all be there, along with others whom I have met at past conferences. The programme or, at least our parts of it, is intended to encourage the idea that we are all in this together, with common themes, problems and solutions running between the different jurisdictions. That will be emphasised by the fact that it falls to Master Whitaker and me to cover Australian developments in the absence of any Australian speaker.

This commonality is again not a coincidence. All the countries represented by this group of people, along with other jurisdictions, have a shared common law (or, strictly, equitable) tradition of discovery, and it is not pure chance either that brings the same individuals together, in different permutations, on platforms around the world.

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